


where no one goes

by cloud_wolfbane, Inkforwords, made_of_sunshine



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Amnesia, Dragons, Fantasy, Loss of Identity, M/M, Non Consensual Daemon Touching, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes, loosely based on httyd
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-20
Updated: 2017-08-20
Packaged: 2018-12-17 13:03:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 40,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11852139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cloud_wolfbane/pseuds/cloud_wolfbane, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Inkforwords/pseuds/Inkforwords, https://archiveofourown.org/users/made_of_sunshine/pseuds/made_of_sunshine
Summary: Three years ago, Steve Rogers woke up on the shores of Skjoldr, barely breathing, his daemon at his side. He remembered nothing of his previous life.Featuring: A war in which he is not the hero, a dragon who may not be what it seems and two boys who are more than they realize.





	1. against the stars

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story has been in the works for over a year, and would not have been completed had it not been for the effort of multiple other people. It was mainly inspired by my love for 'His Dark Materials' by Philip Pullman, and one scene in particular in Northern Lights in which the protagonists, who are children, are running away from their pursuers.
> 
> In the HDM universe humans have corporeal souls, called daemons, that can take the form of animals, able to shift from one form to another in childhood but settling into one shape representative of that person's identity when one becomes an adult. I always wondered, in that scene, why the children did not have their daemons shift into animals able to carry them away faster from the people chasing them. 
> 
> Many, many thanks to the wonderful artists [Inkforwords](http://inkforwordsart.tumblr.com/) and [cloud_wolfbane](https://cloudwolfbane.tumblr.com/) who made really, incredibly amazing pieces, and were incredibly supportive throughout the whole process, including my continuous delays. This work is infinitely better because of them. Go check their pages out!  
> And of course, thanks to the thestuckylibrary team for organizing this year's bang.
> 
> Art in this chapter is by cloud_wolfbane.  
> This work is unbetaed and all mistakes are my own

 

He is falling, and there is something _-someone-_  falling below him, and he has to reach it, has to bridge that ever-growing gap now, before they meet the ground hurtling up towards them.

Almost there.

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees a rippling movement in the clouds, a hint of something impossibly enormous.

There’s a flash of red.

And then-

 

 

Steve wakes up.

He is in his room. Sarah is curled up beside him, the beginnings of a growl rippling through her throat, her hackles raised. She stares at him for a few seconds before he throws his arms around her and buries his face in her neck.

His voice is low, shaky. “Did you get any of that?”

The watery pre-dawn sunlight streaming through the window turns her grey fur to silver. She sighs. “No.” He can hear the reproach in her voice, the “I never do,” that goes unsaid.

“Well,” he says. He takes a deep breath.

It’s been three years.

 

 

Tony’s workshop is particularly chaotic today, and Steve barely escapes being mauled by a prototype, well, _something_ , as he makes his way to the back. He can count four separate new projects in the cramped space, and that’s not including the flamethrowers, the fancy new catapults and the next piece of the armor that the guy’s been working on. The man himself is standing at Steve’s table, wearing one of his new headpieces. Steve stifles a curse.

“Tony.”

There is a prolonged garbled chattering sound before Tony realizes that his helmet-mask in fact does not allow any comprehensible sound through and flips the front half up so that his face is uncovered. His expression is decidedly disgruntled.

“Well, that’s of no use at all. To recap, Cap – ha! -  we’ve got a bunch of new swords in need of inscriptions after yesterday’s attack, so you should get right on that before I lose my patience and make something that will finish them all in an hour.”

“That would be horrible.”

Tony grins. “Don’t tempt me.” He claps Steve on the shoulder once, and then he’s gone.

Steve shakes his head. His desk has about a dozen new swords thrown onto it, and he shoves them all to one side - not without some difficulty given the sorry state of his muscles - before sitting down. Sarah settles at his feet, huffing slightly as she curls up in the cramped space.

“You should get a bigger desk,” she says, her voice echoing strangely from under the wood.

“Yeah, well. You can ask Tony.”

There’s silence for a minute.

“Steve.”

Steve frowns, ignoring her. He’s trying to get the placement of the inscription right. Does _every single_ sword really have to have its own tailored protection spell to be on the crossguard? Wouldn’t it be easier if the elder could come up with a charm that had full coverage? No, _obviously not_. “Everyone is going to encounter different danger, Steven. Different spell is what we do,” Wanda had said in her letter. So here he is, stuck carving spells into crossguards while everyone else his age actually gets to use those swords to fight. He bites his lip as he starts on the first words of Romanoff’s spell. This is one he especially doesn't want to mess up.

There’s a low rumble from underneath the table and then a flare of pain at his ankle. He yelps, dropping the brush.

“What the hell?!”

Sarah’s eyes are flinty.

“You bit me?!”

She doesn't drop her gaze. “Steve, you know I’m not going to talk to him.”

He crosses his arms. “I don’t see why not. Everyone else’s daemons talk to me. You’re the only one who has a problem.”

She looks miserably angry, inasmuch as it is possible for a wolf to do so. “I’m not talking to any of them. They’re _wrong_.”

“You keep on saying that, but you’ve never told me what it means.”

“I don’t _know_ , Steve.”

He narrows his eyes. “Helpful.”

Sarah huffs and stands up. The expression in her dark eyes is hard, flinty. She starts to pad away from him, and Steve feels a bone deep terror. He knows, without knowing why, how it will feel as she gets further: a hollowness at first; then the beginnings of a piercing pain in his chest, growing and growing with the distance between them until it is agony, his heart being gouged out with a barbed dagger piece by bloody piece. The pain still growing until it is unbearable, until -

“Sarah.”

She looks at him, expressionless. His heart is pounding in his chest.

“Please.”

She is only a foot away. (She needs to be closer or he’ll lose her, the snap and the emptiness, the haunted gaze of the soulless wraiths.)

She steps closer, her eyes boring into his. “Don’t ask me to talk to anyone else again.”

He nods mutely.

She curls back up at his feet.

(Sometimes, Steve wonders if it is normal to be scared of your own daemon.)

 

 

They visit the arena in the evening, leaning against the railing of the enclosure and watching the fight. Natasha, as usual, is in the lead without Sam being there to challenge her, subduing the dragons with ease, her daemon gracefully twining around her, on her, leaping from place to place with unmatchable poise. Clint is holed up in one corner, trying to take the beasts out with his custom arrows _again_. One arrow lodges in the hide of a Nadder and explodes in a burst of pink smoke. Steve honestly doesn’t have a clue what that one was supposed to do. He finds out pretty quickly, though. The Nadder inhales some smoke and starts sneezing uncontrollably, a slightly surprised look on its face and Sharon gets it on the nose with the blunt edge of her ax within a minute.

Sarah snorts. “Innovative.”

“I’ll say,” he mutters, watching as the group packs up and traipses over to where they stand. He smiles at them. “Nice work.”

“Thanks, man.” Clint is beaming, his nose slightly bloody. “I should totally do that again.”

There’s a glint in Natasha’s eyes. “Thinking of joining us, Rogers?”

His expression turns wry. He knows it is a joke, one that would be cruel coming from anyone else, but he understands Natasha in a way that he thinks only a few others do. 

“Of course not,” he says. “I wouldn’t want to take the top spot away from you.”

She grins and darts in and out, a peck to his cheek that leaves him blinking. “Of course not.”

They talk for a few minutes, describing the day’s dragons in vivid detail before bidding their goodbyes. Natasha and Clint take the path down that leads to their side of the village while he and Sharon head upwards to the group of houses in which the village chiefs live.

He turns once, and catches a glimpse of Natasha's blood red hair and Clint’s enthusiastic gesturing. He sees them, strong and confident, battle scars waiting to be drawn on their skin, and for a moment he forgets that he has decided not to want that, that he has decided to be quiet and content and do only what his weak lungs and fragile bones allow.

It hurts, though.

In truth, the decision had been made for him - but what could he do? Sneak into the arena in the dead of the night, try and battle a dragon on his own? He had done that. Or at least, he had tried. His lungs had seized up the minute he raised the sword, the dragon advancing on him, fire in its throat.

He had woken up in Helen’s infirmary two days later with an aching head and the information that Fury would be locking him in his room during the night for the next few months to prevent him from hurting himself. He didn't argue. Maybe he _was_ crazy.

Sharon is mostly quiet as they head towards her house. Her father opens the door after a good minute of them knocking, squinting at their faces in the dark. Sharon slips inside wearily, but Steve stays standing at the door.

“Rogers," Philips says tersely.

“Sir.”

“Is there anything you wanted to tell me?”

“Tony says that the new flamethrowers are ready for target practice tomorrow.”

“I’ll have Sharon collect them in the morning.”

There is a moment of silence. Steve’s heart is hammering in his chest. He has tried, but the truth is that trying is not enough if you fail. He wants to try again. He wants to make a difference instead of sitting at a desk and carving spells into weapons that everyone except him gets to use.

“Is that all?”

He blurts out: “I’d like to attend the dragon training classes.”

Philips’ expression hardens. “I thought I had made myself perfectly clear last time. We need people who can fight. We need people who aren't in danger of keeling over and dying the minute they step into the battlefield. We need people who are enough to turn the tide and win this war for us. You, Rogers, are not enough.”

He shuts the door.

Steve stands on the porch in silence for a few seconds before Sarah noses at his hand.

They walk home.

 

                

The next day, the workshop is closed. Steve takes the morning off, hiking in the forest surrounding the village.

_You are not enough._

This is not the first time it has been said. In the beginning, when there was nothing but confusion and fear and a gnawing sense of wrongness, that was all people said: _The gods were mistaken. You are not enough to be chief._

He had punched the first person who said that to his face. Or he had tried to. He was still weak, still disoriented, the fluid still draining out of his lungs. Sarah had been curled up at the foot of his bed, letting out a long, low sound of distress.

It ended up happening the other way around, with his arm pinned behind his back and his face slammed into the wall.

His head was ringing. Rumlow was holding him up by the collar, gearing up for the final blow.

There was a sharp cry of terror from behind him.

Sarah, still shivering from the cold, had pounced onto Rumlow’s hyena daemon and was pinning her down, teeth bared an inch from the hyena’s neck.

Stalemate.

That was when Fury walked in.

Matters were resolved quickly after that, but the event continued to provide fuel to both the optimistic and the detractors. On one hand, Steve had been subdued by the previous frontrunner for the position of chief. On the other hand - what better measure of a man’s soul than the strength of his daemon?

It’s all moot by now anyway, Steve thinks. Rumlow had left six months later on some fool's’ quest to prove his worth and had not been seen in the two years since.

Still, he wishes, as he climbs and as the ache in his lungs builds up to a steady, strong burning, the beat of his heart unsteady with the exertion. What he wouldn’t give to be _better_.

 

***

Wanda is picking berries for her teacher when she notices a disturbance in the brush. It’s still quite far off but she frowns as her powers trail into the ground, sending tendrils through the earth that spread across in a crimson flower until they encounter a lone boy and his wolf-soul.

Unusual, for someone to travel so far this early.

“It must be a sign,” her other half says.

“Hush, Pietro.” She sends a single strand of energy into the boy’s daemon -

    -and is hit by a wave of memories:

_Deathicepainfearlonelinesslonging_

She gasps, opening her eyes. She has fallen to the ground, and Pietro is hovering over her in worry, a question in his eyes. She stands up, brushing down her tunic.

“Yes,” she says, smiling, a predator in the dark. The energy of the boy is familiar, in a way that says she knows him, but only through her infrequent missives to the lower dwellers of the village. “This one we must take with us.”

***

 

Steve is not quite sure how long he has been walking beside the girl before he realizes that she’s there.

“My name is Wanda,” she says, the minute he is fully conscious of her presence. She does not turn around. There is a slight lilt to her words, but Steve - obviously - has no idea where the accent is from. “It is nice to meet you, Steve Rogers and Sarah.”

For some reason, he does not panic at her presence, feeling only a faint confusion at her sudden appearance. But, still a nagging part of him tries to untangle the fog he’s caught in – “How do you know our names?”

She turns to face him, and he sees with a shock that she is much younger than he thought - she can barely be sixteen. The next moment something in her expression changes and he thinks he was wrong: she is older than him by far, a hundred years old.

She smiles a small, secret smile and he thinks that for a split second her eyes are glowing red. “It is not yours to question how, Steve Rogers. You have wandered near the home of the elder, and such things never happen without a reason. Now you must come with me.”

He thinks, now, that he recognizes her from the foggy time just after he woke up. “‘You’re the elder’s apprentice, right?”

“Yes.” There is a streak of grey and a blur materializes in the shadows behind her. She does not blink. “My daemon, Pietro. Follow me.”

He does, still shaken. He knew that witches and their daemons could separate over long distances, but it is one thing to know something and quite another to see it happening. His fingers tighten in Sarah’s fur.

(Maybe she will to look at Pietro and envy that freedom. Maybe she will try to go further, drag herself out of his reach, until -)

She bites his other hand gently. “Focus.”

He tries.

It takes them another half an hour to reach the hollowed out cavern in which the village elder lives. Steve has never seen her, but he has heard the stories. Rationally, he knows he has nothing to be scared of. Tony practically visits every week, bringing back the scrolls with the spells Wanda’s advice and forecasts of coming dangers so that he can build machines to prevent them.

He is still afraid. The village elder is the one who chose him to be chief, saw him even before he knew he existed. In a way, he owes her his life.

“Should I have brought something for her?” he whispers.

Wanda shrugs as they enter. “It is too late for that now.”

Great.

She turns to him. “Come with me and do exactly as I say.”

The entrance of the cave is lighted but deeper inside is entirely dark. Wanda leads him to a chair beside what his eyes can barely make out to be a bed. Once he’s seated she goes over to the hearth and starts banking the dying embers.

“We have a visitor,” Wanda calls. Her voice is clear and carrying.

There is a rustling from the bed.

Steve freezes.

A thin, papery hand reaches out from the darkness to grasp his own.

“Steve,” a gentle, raspy voice says. The hearth behind him bursts into flame under Wanda's ministrations, and he sees her, fragile bones and wrinkled skin.

Time stops.

For an instant he does not notice anything but her eyes and the spark inside them, for an instant he sees her as she was, young and laughing, young and angry, both of them sixteen and ready to take on the world. For an instant, he knows her name.

_Peggy_.

Time, inexorably, marches onward.

The moment ends.

It all slips away again and she is nothing but an old woman he has never met, the village elder who has shaped his life.

“Steve,” she says again, this stranger he does not know. “It’s been so long.”

“You look just the same.”

Steve feels a rising panic. He doesn’t know her. _He doesn’t know her._ He darts a desperate glance towards Wanda, waiting in the shadows.

“Carter,” she says. Her voice is gentle. She glides towards the bed and sits down, tucking a strand of wispy hair back from that lined face. “You’re getting confused. You chose Steve to be chief three years ago. You foresaw that he would come.” Without turning, she addresses her next words to him. “Be useful and go get a glass of water for her, yes?”

It takes him a minute, but by the time he comes back and hands over the glass, the elder’s face is much calmer and she shoots him a rueful smile.

“Do forgive me. My memory isn’t what it used to be. It’s just… you remind me very much of someone who was very dear to me.”

Steve looks down, a lump rising in his throat. For no reason he can name, he feels terribly, inexplicably sad. “That’s alright.”

There’s a sudden sharp rap on his wrist. “Chin up, young man. You’ve got big things coming. Oh, and call me Peggy. I insist.”

His shock must show, because she snorts in amusement.

“Do try to act like I’m not that old.”

He nods quickly. “Okay.”

There’s a quiet laugh from Wanda.

“Now,” She settles back onto the pillows. “What did you want to ask me?”

He opens his mouth, about to say _I didn’t want to ask anything_ when he catches Wanda’s eye. _Such things never happen without a reason_ , she had said. It only takes him a moment to decide.

“I wanted to know how I could fight dragons.”

She looks at him for a moment, contemplative. “What do you know about them?”

“They’re fast. Difficult to wound. Vulnerable points are the wings and the -”

“I did not ask you for their battle capabilities. I asked you what you knew about them. How do they think? Where do they come from? This is what you must know. If you met someone later today and they asked you about me, would you start detailing the best ways to end my life?”

He stops, taken aback.

“Well, go on,” she says.

“I only know they hunt in packs and come from the northern mists.”

She makes a disgusted noise. “No wonder they’re losing if that’s what they’re teaching the kids these days. I ought to have a word with Fury about how he’s let education in this village go lax after I stepped down.”

“...After you stepped down?”

There is a beat of incredulous silence. “I know Fury has been in charge for twenty years, but this is a bit much.”

Wanda places a hand on her arm, soothing. “Steve has only been here three years, Peggy. He has much to learn.” She turns to him. “Carter was chief for forty years before she handed over the mantle to Fury.”

“Oh. Wow. I apologize if I misspoke.”

There is a peal of laughter from the old lady, and suddenly Steve can picture her all those years ago, can see her young and proud and strong.

She would have been amazing.

Peggy wipes a tear from her eye and smiles. “I do wish that had been everyone’s reaction while I was actually doing the job.”

“I don't think anyone would have been able to be much of a problem for you.”

“Oh, they were.” Her voice is suddenly grim. “I took care of them.” She changes her tone abruptly. “Now, didn’t you want to talk about dragons?”

“Yes.”

She folds her hands into her lap. “Tell me when the war against them started.”

“A hundred and fifty years ago.”

“Right. The war started because of one crazed dragon queen swaying hundreds to its will. The queen was eventually defeated, but the damage was done. It had tipped over the edge to all-out war. . After fifty years, almost all the dragons had been killed. Only the isolated packs that had remained uninvolved were left, coexisting with humans if not amicably, then peacefully. But the death of the dragons gave rise to a new problem, one that no one had seen coming.”

He nods, mind working fast. “Territory.”

“Quite right. Care to hazard a guess as to what might have happened?”

“A large group of violent dragons makes a huge area unusable because of the frequency of attacks they would cause. If they dragons were gone, that land would be up for grabs for grazing or settlement. And that would lead to disagreements between the clans.”

She inclines her head. “The conflict lasted a long time. But fighting was now something people were used to, and it was barely a blip in comparison to the long and bloody war that had preceded it. Nowhere near the level of destruction that dragons were responsible for. Until someone had the particularly bright idea of trying to catch a dragon and force it to fight for them, take advantage of the chaos it could cause.”

“They wouldn’t,” Steve says.

“Oh, they did." Peggy replies, her expression grim. "The first dragon was trained to obey by torture, bound by spells and set upon the neighboring village. It was slaughter. No one was ready for a dragon to return. Only one child was left alive, and she fled the village with her daemon. The clan rejoiced and claimed the land. But they were never able to recapture their beast.”

“What happened to it?” he asks.

“It used to belong to one of the peaceful packs, you see. The torture drove it mad. It flew back to its home and seized control of the pack, intending to rain down hell on the people who had hurt it. And it did. This was the start of the second dragon war.”

“History repeating itself,” Steve murmurs, something drawing tight in his chest.

Peggy pauses and looks at him for a moment, seeming to seize him up. “Not quite.”

Steve waits, wondering why he doesn't know all of this already. It’s basic strategy, studying your enemy’s tactics and history rather than blundering around like fools in the dark. It’s seems like a huge oversight on Fury’s part -  not exactly like him - which means -

“Something happened. Something that’s still being covered up.”

Peggy smiles. There’s a low, deep laugh from the shadows of the cavern. A large shape unfolds from behind her and pads into the flickering light of the flame. Steve catches his breath. It’s Peggy’s daemon. Settled into his true form. And he’s - there’s no other word - beautiful. A bobcat, golden fur rippling with strength and shadows. The daemon looks straight at him, and Steve feels both honored and inexplicably sad, aching for the loss of something he can’t remember.

“Correct.”

And then, the strangest thing. Sarah, curled at his feet, raises her nose into the air. She slowly stands up.

He feels a slight pull of curiosity from her.

“This is Sarah,” he says. His lips feel numb. This is the first time Sarah has reacted to _anything_ about another daemon. He wants to shout with joy. He never wants to look at Sarah again.

“Tor,” Peggy says, her gaze growing slightly vague. “Sarah… how odd.”

Wanda suddenly appears beside her, and this time Steve is sure that he doesn’t imagine the slight glow she gives off, a ruby ember waiting to be set alight.

“Peggy,” she murmurs. “Focus. We’re here right now.”

There’s a tense moment of silence.

Peggy takes a deep breath. She looks like she’s holding back tears. It takes a minute before she looks at him, her gaze calm and clear again. “I apologize. My memory isn’t what it used to be and sometimes I can’t really tell what’s right or not. But that isn’t important right now. If you’ve come to me asking about dragons, it is my duty to tell you everything I can. Shall we continue?”

He bows his head. “As you wish.”

She seems to steel herself. “Something did happen. Something so terrible that when he took over, and the threat had somewhat lessened, I gave Fury instructions to stamp out the story. What do you know about the daemon-wraiths?”

“Nothing.”

“As it should be. But Wanda has seen the omens, and it seems that it is time for us to bring back to light our greatest shame. By the time of the second dragon war, people had understood that any fight between a dragon and a human would be long and bloody and more often than not, end worse for us. And so an idea was born. It was a terrible, unforgivable thing that only the most twisted minds could have come up with, but they were desperate times and people saw no other choice. Young children were taken from their homes and groomed into soldiers, trained alongside their daemons. And when they came of age, when they were on the precipice of settling into their true forms, their daemons were asked to shift into dragons one last time.”

Steve catches his breath. Understanding starts to dawn on him and with it an encroaching sense of horror.

Peggy meets his eyes. She’s seen that he’s worked it out. “Their daemons, loyal to their masters, shifted, and then they were trapped. It was an ancient magic, long buried, but it worked, and that was all the warlords cared about. The tesseract trapped them in forms not their own, and then they were cut away from their humans.”

Steve’s heart is hammering in his chest. His knuckles are white in Sarah’s fur.

Peggy takes a deep, shuddering breath, and continues. “It was a terrible time, but it needs to be remembered. Most of those poor children wasted away from the trauma of the separation, but their daemons were not given the same mercy. Strengthened and bound by the same magic, they became the new dragon army. And so a new war started, one that was more bloody and terrible than any before it.”

There is a long silence in the cavern after that statement, as Peggy pauses, a myriad of emotions flashing through her eyes and Steve tries to put in perspective the horror of what he’s hearing with what he has learnt until today. Wanda hovers in the background, half-present, a dream. Peggy steels herself and continues.

“I was one of the ones who helped end it. I was a member of the group of warriors from Skjoldr who helped end the second Dragon war. We were so young. We were what -fifteen? Sixteen? But we felt invincible. An injured dragon had fallen to the village, and instead of killing it, one of our own chose to save it. And so we learnt of the humanity of the dragons, and the evil of the humans, and resolved to do something about it.”

She turns to him, and her eyes, though dimmed with age, are bright. “It’s your turn now, Steve. You must carry the torch.”

He nods, words escaping him.

There’s not much more to say, after that. Steve leaves her to her twilight and returns to the empty, echoing house to eat, visions of long-past wars swimming before his eyes.

 

 

There is a dragon attack that night.

Steve is in the workshop setting up Tony’s stuff for the next day when the alarm sounds. He hears the war cries of the villagers, the rolling hiss and crackle of the houses being set on fire, the terrified screams of the wounded.

He knows what he’s supposed to do. All young and infirm retreat to the storage caverns in the event of an attack.

Fuck that.

Tony’s flamethrowers are standing right there, at the entrance to the workshop. He grabs one, heart pounding an uneven staccato in his chest. Everything Peggy had told him is ringing in his ears. He is going to do something this time. He is going to make a difference.

Sarah whines, tugging at his sleeve. He bats her away, sending the force of his determination through their bond. She is not going to stop him this time. She is not going to let him continue being safe and miserable.

He runs as fast as he can, tugging the contraption behind him, the tightness in his chest growing with every step. The chaos of the attack shields their movements, and out of the corner of his eye he sees Natasha stabbing a Zippleback through the eye, Clint perched in a burning tree shooting purple arrows into the beasts’ mouths, Rhodey using his custom-made gauntlets to hold the flaming mouth of a Nadder shut.

He runs. The outcropping of rock at the edge of the village is a good vantage point and far enough away that no one is likely to be there. It takes him a good five minutes to reach it, and by the end of that time there are black spots clouding his vision, each breath rasping in and out of his lungs. He grabs onto Sarah, clutching at her fur to keep himself upright. She tolerates it for a bare minute before she growls and shakes his hands off. She’s right. There’s no time.

Still gasping for breath, he grabs onto the release mechanism and looks through the scope, aiming into the darkness of the night sky. There is nothing at the moment - all the dragons have likely reached the village. But soon enough - if he waits - there will be something. A flash of wings. A dragon will take to the sky.

He’s right.

There is a streak of movement against the clouds. A blur of one darkness against another. Here and gone in the blink of an eye. But, somehow, he still knows where it is. It’s almost as if he can sense its movements, feel the air currents under its wings -

Steve’s heart, for the first time in years, beats steadily as he aims.

He fires.

For a moment, there is nothing. Silence, with the fading sounds of battle behind him. Then a piercing shriek tears through the sky. The sound rips through him, almost bringing him to his knees. For an instant, the flames light up a nightmarish silhouette against the stars, and then it is falling, falling, a blazing trail of fire and fury.

Heart in his throat, he follows its path through the scope. It looks like it lands in the midst of the woods on the other side of the island.

Something rushes through him, a feeling so strong it feels like it’s burning his skin up, lighting his heart on fire. He doesn’t know what it is, whether it is victory, or fear, or disbelief or something else, something deeper - worse - than he's ever known.  

He brought down a dragon.

The feeling is quickly overcome by panic as he hears a rustling in the underbrush behind him. He whirls around, unsheathing his dagger.

It’s Fury.

“You,” the village chief says, stalking towards him, “are in so much trouble.”

 

***

Usually, there’s nothing.

Nothing that matters, anyway. 

(Sometimes there is confusion. It is smothered in the darkness, pressed down to emptiness, like everything else.)

Each sun-up-to-sun-down, the same blur of grey and black and blinding red. In and out of the darkness. In and out and in and out and the killing. Greyblackred. Over and over again.

But today -

Today felt different. 

(- felt?)

A tug in his chest, like the familiar-not-familiar crack of a hard-white breaking inside, splintering through the skin. But - not that. It. It felt worse.

( _he needs to get out of here - where is she -_ )

In the red and the hissing, the many-scaled monster advances out of the dark. Silence, as the drop of a pin, a heartbeat above the clouds.

The rasp of scales against his skin-not-skin. Claws. Forward, forward, to where the gaping maws wait for him, hungry, searching.

_Pain_.

 ***

 

When all's said and done, no one believes Steve. You, take down a dragon? He hears them think. With your eyesight, your weak heart?

Aright then, he thinks, and the next day, when the more able-bodied are hammering beams back into place and corralling frightened livestock back into their pens, he sets off, notebook in hand to find it. If nothing else, the hide of a downed dragon is fireproof and good for armor, and its bones are good for spells.

Sarah doesn’t like it at all. But she owes him.

“You should turn back,” she tries anyway. “It’s safer. Please.”

Steve ignores her. His fingers dig into the scruff at her neck, hard, almost dragging her along. He knows that it hurts. He can feel it. She whines, but keeps at his side.

They’ve been searching for half the day when it happens. Steve has a map of the island in his notebook, painstakingly copied out from one of the old books Sam showed him in the library. He’s made a rough estimate of the dragon’s trajectory, and he knows that they’re in its general vicinity, but until now there’s been no sign of it.

Then Sarah scents something.

Steve feels it, even as she tries to hide the fact. He crouches down in front of her, after her initial refusal and his fruitless attempts to drag it out from their bond and tries to summon the patience to be kind. “Let me find it,” he says, trying to show her the depth of his conviction across the yawning gap between them. “I’ll stay out of danger.”

Sarah doesn’t meet his eyes. “You never do,” she says but he feels a weary resignation coming from her. She puts her nose to the ground and they advance slowly, tracking the scent.

There's a trail.

A broken bush here, a bent sapling there. Steve pulls out his dagger and Sarah swallows back the low growl threatening to escape her. They move forward as one, careful not to make too much noise. It leads down to a sunken recess the length of a courtyard across, nature’s mockery of the dragon training enclosure, a rainwater-fed lake as clear as the sky to one side within it.

 And there it is.

A dragon, in the flesh.

 

 

It’s terrifying.

It’s beautiful.

Its body is huddled up by the edge of the crater, close to a copse of trees, scales a solid black edging to a silvery sheen where the dappled sunlight breaks through the leaves. It's not large, for a dragon; its length from snout to tail would be slightly more than of a cart and its horse taken together. But that makes it no less intimidating.

At first, Steve thinks it's dead, that the fire thrower wounded it and it crashed to the ground and crawled to a hollow and died, proud and alone. But then he realises that he can see it breathing. 

Its chest moves up and down in a slow, steady rhythm. Steve moves forward unconsciously. He needs to get closer. He needs to see it properly. 

Without knowing how, he’s suddenly only a stone’s throw away. The beast’s eyes are still closed, small puffs of grey smoke escaping its nostrils with every breath visibly from this distance. Sarah is alongside him, edging forward as he does, caught in the same rush of familiarity, of wonder that he’s feeling. A low whine is building in her throat. Both she and Steve are too distracted to stop her from making the sound.

The dragon wakes up.

There’s no burst of blue fire, no claws raining down from above. It simply opens its eyes.

Like it was never asleep at all.

Steve and Sarah freeze.

The next moment is a tense, frozen stalemate of sorts, both parties evaluating their situation; the dragon, staring at the human-daemon pair with a terrifyingly unfathomable expression in its eyes, and him and Sarah, breathing shallowly hearts pounding with a combination of fear and something impossibly lighter, something almost like joy.

Steve knows that something has to break eventually in this standoff. And he knows that his lungs are weak and his bones are brittle and he would be as good as dead if the dragon even made the slightest move, but he has to get closer; this is the one thing he’s done that will matter. There’s no room for the fear running through him, no room for the caution and wariness born of habit.

It recoils, hissing, when he takes a tentative step forward, his hands held up in mock surrender, and suddenly, like being thrown into a lake of icy water, a rush of pain flows through him. It’s hurt. He knows it is. He can feel it, the gash gaping wide along its foreleg, blood dripping down. The blood has dried between the scales and it itches, another annoyance fluttering above the unwavering pain. And it's hungry. And tired. And still, it wants to tear, to rip apart the world until it gets back what it has lost, and-

Gasping, Steve comes back to himself.

He’s still where he was, mere feet away, hands held out to his sides. But Sarah - Sarah, who never talks to anyone else, who never goes near the dragons rattling mournfully in their cages at the training ground - she’s stepped right up to it. She can feel what it's feeling.

Steve’s heart stops, ice-cold. He’s never been more afraid. His own useless body is one thing, but Sarah - his dear, precious, stubborn soul - she’s too far away. She’s too far away. He can feel the pulling pain yet, but he knows it's coming, he doesn’t want to feel it- _doesn’t want to_ -

But if he makes a move towards her, the dragon, that poor frightened creature, might react. It could claw her to shreds.

(And then what would he be? A night-ghast, a ghost. Better off dead.)

Sarah ignores his fear. She pads closer, and the dragon, thank the gods, does nothing. Then she touches her nose to its hide.

 Steve wants to rush forward, grab her away, take them both back to the safety of the workshop and the village. But he's frozen, fear clouding his vision, heart beating an uneven staccato as it pumps blood through his useless body. 

“Steve,” she calls, in her clear, carrying voice. “She’s hurt.”

Steve takes a shaky breath. Sarah is telling him not to worry, telling him that that the dragon means neither of them any harm. It doesn't take away the terror entirely, but does bring back some measure of calm, of rationality. It’s almost as if she and the dragon are communicating, like daemons do between themselves in their own secret ways. It doesn’t feel exactly like that though. It’s more blurry, indistinct.

He forces the words through numb lips. “Will it let me come closer?”

Sarah pauses for a moment, considering. “Yeah. But slowly. No sudden movements.”

He edges forward, emboldened by her lack of fear.

He examines it. _Her_ , Sarah pushes in, and he acknowledges the thought and moves on seamlessly. There’s the rip in the foreleg - undoubtedly the worst of the wounds. Steve could stick his entire hand into the gash, and the blood loss has already taken its toll. Steve remembers the trail Sarah had followed. Blood. She had been following its blood.

There are also small tears along the edges of the wings, severely limiting the dragon’s flight capacity, and a few long, shallow gashes along her torso. Steve guesses that the main body of the projectile he fired directly hit her leg and then the explosion caught the wings and body, bringing her tumbling down to earth. He almost feels bad for her.

The wounds she’s sustained are definitely life threatening, if left untreated, and with her wings clipped - in a manner of speaking - the dragon will starve out sooner or later without food. It’s a death sentence either way.

“Steve,” Sarah hisses, feeling his assessment. “We have to help her.”

He raises his eyebrows. Looking pointedly at the dragon, he steps away to the nearest rock outcropping, never taking his eyes off it. Sarah follows, glaring.

“ _Why?_ ” is the first thing out of his mouth.

Sarah is speechless for a second. “This is cruel, even for you.”

That stings. “Says you.” But he can see her point. They are not savages. And however much he wants to help out in this war, bring the world down upon those who threaten the people who took him in, whether a lone dragon dies slow or fast makes little difference. A swift death would be a mercy. And he doesn’t want to be someone who would leave another – even an enemy – to suffer alone with no hope of the agony ending.

He strides forward taking his dagger out, not bothering to space out his movements. Now he’s seen the extent of the dragon’s injuries, he knows that after a night spent bleeding out from the wound it’ll be too weak to do anything to him as long as he stays out of range of its mouth.

The dragon watches him, and her - its eyes widen. Feebly, it tries to scramble backwards, but stops and keens with pain as weight is put on its bad foreleg. Its panting. It - she - knows what he’s going to do. She’s scared.

He’s standing above her now, right next to her but where she can’t turn around and see him properly, curled on the ground, too weak to even move her head now as she is. He clutches the dagger with both hands.

He’s going to do this. And it’ll mean something, in the endless in and out of sitting inside because his body has failed him while the others get to fight, and run, and touch the sun. It’ll balance the scales somewhat, against all the times the others have hurt themselves to protect him from one of their attackers, and he could not repay the debt. He’ll have brought a dragon down. Next time there’s a village raid, there will be one less beast to fight. He’ll have helped in some small way, bring this war to an end.

He’s going to do this.

He raises the blade.

The dragon closes her eyes.

She’s afraid, he realizes, with a jolt.

She’s afraid.

Steve suddenly remembers Peggy’s words. The dragons in the training enclosure. The heavy gates that held them in darkness, the buckets of slop poured in through a tiny hole. The chains. And their anger, the moment they were released, taking out their fury on those who had held them captive, only to be forced back into the cages at the end.

It’s like looking through a mirror, like breaking out of the box he’s lived in, seeing the truth waiting for him outside.

Is he the dragon here, ready to kill the moment he’s let out of his box? Or is he the scared, determined kid, let into the enclosure for the first time to be trained to kill the enemy, raising his sword up to fight but failing, falling because his body betrayed him, was too weak to defend itself.

 

 

He was right, before. The war must end.

But not like this.

He has a chance to break the cycle.

He looks up. Sarah is watching him. He has the sudden, fleeting feeling that had he tried to bring the dagger down, she would have jumped in its way.

His mind shies away from the thought.

“Let’s go,” he says instead. The dragon’s eyes are still closed, but flash open when he tightens his belt around its upper foreleg, slowing the flow of blood through the wound. It’s not enough. Sarah noses at him urgently and they start running, leaving the injured creature behind.

Sarah rushes him back to the forge. She’s scared, a steady encroaching dread as the dragon’s life ticks away. He sees a picture form in her mind and understands what to do.

Tony’s been working on some armor. He’s been making the metal himself, carefully alloying titanium and iron and some gold he won off a few southern traders to forge the suit he’s been designing. Steve gathers up the scraps of the alloy and goes over to the furnace, starting the process to melt them down. He’s watched Tony enough times to know the basics. While the metal is heating up Steve grabs a small ceramic bowl, an original copy of one of Tony’s notes and his favorite pair of gloves

The gloves are brown leather, fingerless so that he can keep up his usual levels of dexterity while carving inscriptions or painting a mural in the cold. He measures them, and then examines his own fingers and watches the interplay of skin and the muscles beneath, noting down the size and thickness of the metal he’ll need.

Sarah gently sets her teeth on his shoulder. He turns around, driven more by her than himself. She’s holding a small whittling knife in her teeth. Steve takes it from her and slashes it across her outstretched paw.

Pain.

Steve curls up for a minute, Sarah whimpering beside him. But there’s no time to waste. Gasping, tears in his eyes, he pushes the ceramic bowl under her paw and watches as blood - he imagines that he can see the golden Dust woven through - drips down into it.

As soon as it's enough, he grabs Tony’s notes and tears them into strips, making sure that he tears along the writing and not across it. Then he wraps it around the cut.

That should take care of it for now.

He carefully pours the crucible into a small bucket of water, briefly pausing to watch the scarlet cloud billowing below the clear surface and then rushes to Tony’s hard setting clay and molds it, keeping one eye on the furnace. When the metal is red hot, he slowly, carefully, pours it into the hardened mold.

Far off, Steve can almost feel the dragon's heartbeats slowing, see it feebly trying to curl up even more to conserve warmth but giving up halfway through the movement, too weak and dazed with pain. It knows its going to die.

There's nothing he can do.

He waits.

 

 

 

> _Daemons are of the soul but they are also of Dust, and what is Dust but the conscious mind's’ understanding? Everything a human mind affects is imbibed with dust, and that which bears the mark of a dedicated passion even more than the common tools of the uninspired mind._
> 
> _Hence arose the myth that a healer would cure both daemon and the flesh. And yet, a school or a theatre would serve as well - if not better. For it is the abundance of this Dust in the air that is Daemon’s benefactor in such times, second only to that unbreakable bond between that part of a being that rises to Valhalla and its infinite soul._
> 
> _\- Skjoldr archives, author unknown; work suspected to be written by Jane Foster (traveler from shores unknown, “Star Gazer”) and Donald Blake (No records found)._
> 
>  

 


	2. flight

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Spoilers for the ending of Northern lights in the quote.

 

 

 

> _Lyra leaped up and seized Roger's hand._  
>    
>  _She pulled hard, and then they tore away from Lord Asriel and ran, hand in hand, but Roger cried and twisted, because his daemon was caught again, held fast in the snow leopard's jaws, and Lord Asriel himself was reaching down toward her with a wire; and Lyra knew the heart-convulsing pain of separation, and tried to stop -_  
>    
>  _But they couldn't stop._  
>    
>  _The cliff was sliding away beneath them._  
>    
>  _An entire shelf of snow, sliding inexorably down -_  
>    
>  _The frozen sea, a thousand feet below -_  
>    
>  _"LYRA!"_  
>    
>  _Her heartbeats, leaping in anguish with Roger's -_  
>    
>  _Tight-clutching hands -_  
>    
>  _His body, suddenly limp in hers._
> 
> _-_ Northern Lights _, Philip Pullman_
> 
>  

 

* * *

 

Within four hours, Steve has what he needs.

He and Sarah run back to the hidden valley where the nameless dragon is bleeding out, slipping into the infirmary on the way, getting medical supplies, and also stealing a backpack’s worth of fish from the docks. Steve has had some training under Cho, but the less said about his success during that time the better, in his opinion. Suffice it to say he learnt enough to know what to do right now.

The dragon is curled up like before, its breathing frighteningly shallow, eyes closed. It doesn't react when they draw close, even when Sarah nuzzles its jaw, something that makes Steve have to pause for a moment to push down his panic. He puts a hand to its scales and its temperature is low. Almost as low as the surroundings.

It’s not looking good.

Steve slips on his modified gloves - threads of steel tempered in daemon blood woven through the leather - works off his makeshift tourniquet and picks up the crude needle he managed to fashion out of the melted alloy. Sarah is put on dragon monitoring duty to make sure he knows when it begins to wake up. He dusts some Azadirachta powder into the gash in its foreleg, flushes the wound with the solution Helen keeps simmering beside the fire in the infirmary, and threads the needle, beginning to stitch it up.

He’s done with the foreleg and with one of the three bigger rips in the wings when the dragon begins to stir. He carefully, slowly puts the needle and thread down and backs away a couple of feet, doing his best to keep his movements smooth and unthreatening. Sarah doesn’t move.

“Sarah,” he hisses out of the corner of his mouth. She eyes him, and takes a single step back, unwilling to back down. “Please,” he says, and it feels like it's an eternity before she relents and joins him further away from it, quelling the rising panic. He holds onto the long fur at the scruff of her neck, and they watch from a safer distance as the dragon stirs, and finally blinks its eyes open.

They’ve left the pile of fish in front of it - a peace offering of sorts. Steve had reasoned that it would help get its strength back up if nothing else.

The dragon slowly raises its head, eyeing the fish mistrustfully. It leans down to sniff the pile and then whips its head around to them both and snarls, baring its teeth. Steve holds his breath. When he and Sarah don't react, the dragon staggers onto three feet, hissing.

Both he and Sarah back down, edging away to the other side of the hollow, trying to make their body language as nonthreatening as possible. In response, the dragon’s stance gradually eases, attention slowly turning to the fish over the next few minutes even though one ear remains cocked in their direction. It investigates the pile for a minute, and then swipes the whole thing into the lake with its tail, snorting with contempt.

“Hey!”

The dragon's head darts up, eyes zeroing in on them immediately. Sarah’s teeth are on his sleeve, gently telling him to back down. Steve subsides somewhat mutinously. It took some effort to lug that all the way across the island.

Once the dragon is satisfied that he’s no longer a concern – something that takes close to half an hour of suspicious staring -  it limps to the best vantage point and curls up, settling down to sleep. Steve and Sarah stay where they are. Steve's mind is whirring, but all his thoughts are shapeless, half-formed. But he knows. He knows that this is the beginning of something important.

“You should give her a name,” Sarah whispers.

Steve turns to her, eyebrows raised. “You never cared about the horses this much, let alone the other daemons.”

Sarah sniffs haughtily. “She is not a _horse_.”

Steve has to give her that one. And besides, they’re trying something new here. Or maybe, something old. He remembers Peggy’s story. A chance for peace.

“Don’t you think she already has a name? A dragon one?”

Sarah nips him. “As much as the horses have names for each other, you dummy. Give her a human name. I chose the last time; it's your turn this time.”

Steve hums in acquiescence, gaze turning to the sleeping shadow across the lake. He remembers his first glance of the dragon in the vast wasteland of the night sky. The burst of fire that nearly killed her. The silver rippling on her scales. How close to death she had come before he gathered the sense to save her, the worrying coolness of her skin before he started stitching her up. The way she survived it, survived him, and curled down to sleep afterwards, unafraid. 

And something else, slipping like sand through his fingers as soon as it arrives: A flash of blue. The wind, howling past him. A name he can’t remember. He thinks it began with ‘Z’.

“Zima,” Steve says, and the name settles on his tongue with the same faint sense of wrongness that Sarah’s own name does, but he supposes that it will do.

 

***

The soldier watches, and waits in the red and the darkness. The many-hungry-mouths are unfed, and soon they will be sent out into the vast emptiness to bring back the screaming white things and the slippery grey. So: the waiting. The stillness-not-stillness as blood drips from the living walls, down, down down along the faded greys and the black into the boiling cauldron beneath.

But the black is all wrong.

No. Nonononono.

_Where is she?_

The hissing grows louder. A shadow rises from the depths.

For the hundredth time, for the thousandth time, the soldier feels overwhelming, all-consuming terror. Then he forgets that he ever felt anything at all.

***

 

Over the next few days, Zima begins to trust Steve - though she never lets him as close as he had come the first time - and starts responding to her name. Steve never sees her eat, but she must be hunting fish in the lake during the early hours, because each successive day sees her better and healthier than the day before.

 Sarah has none of the same problems though, and goes right up to her, completely unafraid, and soon the two creatures - one of Dust and one of fire - become friends of a sort.

He doesn't really get their relationship. In a way, it makes sense that they would be close, but Sarah is just so much more vibrant, so alive even despite the distance she keeps between herself and the world around her, while Zima shows a clear indifference to everything that might disturb her solitude. Each time she tilts her head, nudges Sarah, hisses at him as he sits some distance away sketching, Steve gets the impression that's she’s struggling to pay attention to them at all. Like he and his daemon are just temporary, fleeting distractions from a vast emptiness, an irreparable loneliness that seems to occupy her every waking moment.

But what would he know, he thinks ruefully. That might just be him, projecting onto her, like he does so often without knowing why.

Regardless of the reasons, Zima and Sarah have struck up a friendship. It something Steve watches with an air of bemusement, both because of its strangeness and its mercurial nature. Most of the time, Zima tolerates Sarah, but Sarah, for her part seems to absolutely adore Zima. The first time she huddled up close to the dragon’s warm scales, Steve nearly had a heart attack, and not because of the thick, swampy air or his sluggish blood. It wasn’t even fear for her. By that time, they had established an understanding with the dragon, and knew that she wouldn’t hurt them without warning. It was the simple fact that his aloof, isolated daemon was making a connection, was not isolating herself, and Steve felt a depth of feeling coming from her that he hadn’t felt in - he couldn’t remember how long. It was like a limb coming back to life.

He dreaded the day Zima would leave.

After a few days, when Steve knows the stitches will start becoming more of a nuisance than a help, Sarah convinces Zima to let him close again to take them out. The dragon acquiesces with much hissing and several contemptuous glances in his direction.

 

 

He is tending to Zima’s foreleg, the rip in the fine membranes of her wing. The stitches came out a few days ago, and he's checking the wounds over for infection. It’s almost healed. Technically, she could fly now, but he and Sarah have managed to convince her not to. It would be too risky.

He finishes checking her over, dusting some more Azadirachta powder over the mostly-healed wounds, and then gently places his gloved hand along Zima’s flank to let her know that he’s done. It always feels weird, touching her, like it shouldn’t be allowed. She huffs and sends him a sullen look - she doesn’t like it either - before rolling over towards Sarah, who’s grinning, something Steve can’t ever remember seeing before. He smiles, starting to pack up.

That’s when it all goes to shit.

There's no warning, but Zima suddenly tenses, ever muscle going freezing up at once, and Steve and Sarah freeze in response. He didn't do anything. But he studies the dragon and it's almost like she's responding to something far way, her eyes glazed and unfocused. Steve and Sarah exchange a wordless glance, and Steve starts slowly backing away, holding out a hand to tell Sarah to stay where she is.

Zima clambers to her feet, growling, and then stands stock still and Steve and Sarah both reflexively freeze. He wants to run and grab onto Sarah, but he knows that would only slow them down.

Then the dragon throws her head back and roars, an earth-shaking, ear-shattering sound, and it rings of pain and misery, and Steve can see small shivers running down her length as she strains her neck up towards the sky, and the echoes of it run through him, and he understands, for a single point of time: she's being called - he's being called, but it's not Steve, it's _him_.  All of a sudden, her gaze narrows down to him like she can hear his thoughts, like she knows that he can understand. They had started backing away, but they’ve underestimated her reach when she doesn’t have to risk pulling the stitches.

Always, always too slow. Always too far away.

Zima grabs him in her claws. She’s holding him with her forelegs wrapped around him just underneath his arms, but there's’ no way for him to move, to pry her grip off. By the time he’s even realized what’s happening, it's too late.

She spreads her wings, and he’s lifted into the air.

(Sarah is only two feet away. Like she’s always been. From the moment he opened his eyes for the first time on the beach and saw her, his nameless, unknowable soul, she has never left his side. She pounces forward as soon as they realize what’s happening. She’s not fast enough.)

Steve would have screamed. But he’s so scared, so paralyzed with terror that his lungs have frozen up. He and Sarah were fixing things, making things better between themself, and so he had grown complacent, and now the old familiar fear comes in a towering wave, catching him off guard entirely, and he’s swallowed up in its force. His heart has stopped, or maybe it's just beating so fast that he can’t feel it. He can't move. And dear Al- Sarah, receding into the distance, jumping upwards, trying to reach him, helplessly, hopelessly.

Steve knows, with absolute certainty, that he’s going to die.

His mind has moved somewhere beyond panic now. The ground is dropping away - they are over the treetops - he can see the island draped out over the sea beneath him - and Sarah, growing smaller and smaller and so terribly alone. He's alone. He's going to die. His body is still in overdrive, sucking in breaths like he’s drowning, but his consciousness has receded to a tiny pinprick in an ocean of darkness, hanging on by a tenuous thread. The world breaks and reforms, and turns inside out. Vaguely, he sees the grey spot that Sarah’s become.

Weird. He’s not dead yet.

Maybe he is and it just hasn’t caught up yet.

The wind is whistling past him, alternatingly thin, and then a burst of pressure as Zima sweeps her wings downwards. It’s barely been thirty seconds since she swooped him up.

He’s so far from Sarah now. She’s barely a dark speck amongst the distant green. 

And -

And nothing is happening.

There is no pulling pain. No meathook dragging metal out of his heart. No being flayed open and laid bare as something vital from inside him is pulled out into the open where it never should be. Just the remnants of panic uselessly circling in his blood and his heart beating a steady rhythm as he clings on to consciousness.

Wait.

(Steady?)

It's like coming back to life.

Up in the air, a panicked dragon carrying him away from his daemon, Steve wakes up. His lungs pull in the thinner air smoothly, easily, like they were made to do. His heart feels like it's working for the first time, pumping liquid energy through his veins. He’s been looking at the world through a fogged-up glass for the last three years, and it's suddenly like everything has come back into focus, like he’s seeing it all for the first time, like he's come alive.

He's here. He's alive.

In a flash, he knows what to do.

Steve pulls off a glove with his teeth and presses a bare hand to Zima’s scales.

A current of electricity jolts through the both of them, and Zima shudders, snarling, almost letting go, but Steve hangs on ruthlessly, clinging onto her with all his strenght, and there's suddenly so much of it, enough that he feels like he could be a dragon himself. It feels wrong down to his bones, but he’s not letting go. He’s not dying. Not today.

Zima shakes and keens, and he finds his voice and yells, “Take me back and I’ll let go,” and the dragon wheels around, shudders running through her as she struggles to stay aloft.

They’re back over the clearing, Zima coming lower and lower as she prepares to land. When she’s a good fifteen feet above the ground, Steve lets go and drops, rolling to his feet. He watches as she swoops towards a boulder and lands there, curling up, still trembling. He turns his gaze to Sarah, still standing where she was minutes ago, her eyes locked on his.

He isn’t afraid. For the first time since he can remember, he feels right in his own body. Powerful. Like he could tear down a tree with his bare hands, rip apart the bark and pull it out from the roots. The jolt of adrenaline and his past fear almost feel laughable. 

Sarah is looking at him as he strides forward. 

“You knew,” he says. It’s not a question.

She must have known that - that they could do this. That they would not die if they were torn apart. She was hiding it from him, letting him live afraid, for - for what?

She does not shift her gaze. “Yes.”

She must feel the anger, the hurt and the betrayal running through him, because she steps forward, not shifting her gaze. “If I knew then you knew, Steve. You were just hiding from the truth.”

And he realizes the strangeness of the two of them bickering like they're two separate people when they’re just reflections of each other, the same person in two different forms. She is his soul, and he is her human, and of course, if she knew then so did he, and he had been hiding from the truth this entire time, hiding from the pain, or from the knowledge that lay behind it.

He’s such a coward.

Sarah sees him thinking it, and there’s such a strong surge of denial from her that all his thoughts stop in their tracks. She pads forward and presses her nose to his hand. “No, Steve. You were the bravest person I ever knew. I was scared every minute of every day that you would realize that you didn’t need me and you would jump onto a dragon like you did last time and you would die.”

He doesn’t understand. He can’t properly process what Ale- Sarah is saying. He can hear the words, but it's overlaid by a great crashing sound in his ears, the ocean pounding against a rocky shore, memories threatening to spill over into his conscious mind.

“I’ve done this before,” he says, and realizes only what it means as the words come out.

“Yes,” Sarah says. “You chose the war over yourself.”

 

 

That night, Steve goes to the library, slipping the key out from where Sam leaves it. By the flickering light of a candle, he reads. And he learns. There are only two ways someone can survive leaving their daemon. The first is being severed -  and that, that is not survival at all, not really. A person without their daemon is not a person at all. They would be a nightmare, a shadow, something to be pitied and given the mercy of a swift death.

The second is one Steve only learns about when there is an inch left of the candle and his weakened eyes are itching from reading for hours and the sun is nudging the horizon. There are stories of a ritual. A person must cross a barren wasteland, leaving their daemon behind, holding a purpose, a promise in their hearts so strong that it overcomes the soul-deep bond between daemon and human. A person must honor that promise at the cost of their own soul.

When he finally looks up from the books, Sarah is nowhere in his sight.

Terror overtakes him for a moment, but it is nowhere as bad as it was before. He remembers again that she can leave him. As a matter of fact, being able to do that means that he did leave her, left her behind for some higher purpose, some promise that meant more to him than his own soul did. It seems unfathomable to him now. He wonders who the old Steve was, and how he was able to betray himself so easily.

The day, when it truly begins, is perhaps most surprisingly of all, normal. Tony is engrossed in his work, some newfangled lenses that would “let us see the universe, Steven!” and the others are in dragon training, the far off clangs of their swords echoing against the hills. Sarah had slunk back in the early hours of the morning to prevent the widespread panic seeing a person without a daemon or vice versa would cause, but she ignores him, sitting slightly further away than he would have liked. It sets his teeth on edge, like the taste of buzzing iron in the forge. He keeps on feeling the irrational fear that they will be torn apart again, despite the fact that it can never happen now, not with the terrible gift that his past self has given him.

Perhaps he should be grateful.

 

 

In the evening, they head into the woods.

Sarah slips out in front of him, ranging a good distance away before matching his pace. Steve tries to stop the instinctive quickening of his heart, the pulse of fear, but can’t. She feels it as he does, but all he gets from her in return is a feeling of vindictiveness, almost. The suggestion of ‘this is what you did, leaving me. This is how I felt in those first few moments', taking full advantage of the fact that he still fears it but won't be hurt by it. He doesn't begrudge her too much.

“You remember, don’t you,” he says. He’s been thinking about it. The distance between them. The way she knows him better than she knows himself.

“More than you,” she replies. “Not everything.”

He takes that in. He suspected, for a long time. But if she hasn't said anything yet, she won't now. He examines the hundreds of questions running through his mind, choosing carefully what he wants to ask. “Am I very different?”

She pauses in front of him and then heads back with her easy hunter’s grace. “Yes,” she finally says after a moment. “The old you never knew what it was to be weak.”

A flash-memory from her: Strong arms, lifting her up, laughing together, full of joy.

He aches for what he can't remember.

 

***

Steve’s first memory is the beach. It comes in fragments. The rough grit of sand against his cheek. The crashing of the waves. Cold, running, burning through every part of him; he feels like he’s breathing ice. There is shouting, somewhere in the distance, but his mind is still too scrambled to register it. Something nudges his cheek. A whine.

He remembers that he has eyes, and forces them open.

Above him, an animal. No - not an animal. Himself. The curious sensation of double vision, both perspectives blurry, out of focus. He is the boy, skin bone-white, struggling to breathe. He is the wolf, swaying on its feet, standing over its human. A jolt of realization. Himself. His daemon. His soul.

The whirling in his head reaches a crescendo, and he passes out.

 

 

“I’m Helen.”

He opens his eyes, or maybe his eyes are already open and he’s just noticed it. There are sheets under him, white, soft, smooth. The wolf is there again, curled at his feet.

A woman stands over him. Her dark hair is pinned back from her face. A doctor’s smock, stiff, starched white. She moves her hand in front of his eyes and he flinches.

“Oh good,” she says. “You’re awake.”

The world fades away again.

 

 

It’s maybe the fourth or fifth time that he wakes up - it could be more, but his memory of those days is hazy, coming in fits and starts - that he stays awake long enough to be of any use. The doctor, whose name he has now figured out is Helen, is standing at the next bed over. There is a weight on his chest, and it takes him a few minutes to come to the conclusion that it isn’t in his head and is actually the wolf resting her head on him, one eye open.

“Finally awake?” she murmurs. Her tone is one of fondness and exasperation. “That was a damn fool thing you did. I don't think I forgive you yet.”

He can only stare at her.

She lifts her muzzle off his chest. “Steve?”

Nothing. He has no idea where he is, what has happened. Pieces of the beach, in flashes. And before that, whiteness. The emptiness of a field of snow.  And there is something, something in his head teetering on the edge, threatening to spill over. The thick, swampy air moves in and out of his lungs as he breathes faster and faster, his expression of growing panic mirrored in the wolf’s.

“Helen!” the wolf cries, and scrambles off the bed. “Helen, there’s something wrong!” She starts to trot away, and a wave of all-consuming terror crashes over him. He tries to get up, and his fingers spasm.  His muscles are weak. She’s getting too far away. _She’s getting too far away_. He has to move, but his body isn’t responding, twitching helplessly as he tries to reach out, bring her closer. He rolls, crashing over the side of the bed onto the rough cut stones, but it doesn’t matter, she’s three feet away now, she can’t get any further _she can’t_ , and he reaches forward, clawing against the stone with trembling fingers, trying to pull himself towards her. Breaths are wheezing in and out of his lungs, a death rattle. Four feet away now. The stretching and snapping of a string. A blade coming down. He’s going to die. They’re going to die.

It has been five seconds since she left his side. She starts to turn towards him, sensing something wrong, but her forward momentum continues. Five feet. The flash of silver. The end, looming in front of him, _redredred_ , blocking out the sky. He knows they’re dead.

He doesn’t remember much after that.

 

 

He comes to, hours, minutes, days later, with a gasp, heart hammering. His hand reaches out, clutching, and she’s there. The wolf. Her fur is soft, a lovely greyish white. The colour of dawn just before the sun breaks over the horizon. “Steve,” she says. She’s squeezed in beside him in the narrow cot in what he now realises must be the hospital. “What happened?”

Steve. He tries it on, and the name fits. He opens his mouth to reply. His throat rasps. His tongue is dry. When he finally speaks, it sounds like the grating of a rusty window opening. “I don’t know.”

“That’s all right,” she says comfortingly. “We’ll figure it out together.”

Steve doesn’t understand.

 

 

Eventually, when he’s recovered enough to stay awake for long enough, the doctors come over to ask their questions and it all comes out.

What does he remember?

Nothing.

And his name?

Steve.

Steve? Anything else?

He - he doesn't remember.

His daemon’s name?

 He stares at the wolf mutely. He doesn’t know. Beside him, she slowly stiffens. 

The doctors leave. She turns to him, her dark eyes boring into his. “Steve?” she says. It's almost like she’s pleading. He can’t meet her eyes.

He shakes his head.

The wolf curls in on herself.  And it's the most curious, most horrible sensation, like when you’re looking at a knife coming down to chop off your hand and you can do nothing about it, and it's gone, and it's never coming back, except a hundred, a thousand times worse because it was her, it was himself, it was his own hand bringing down the knife and it was his own soul that was cold bloodedly, ruthlessly cutting him away, shutting him out.

When she straightens, hours later, there is something dead in her eyes.

 

 

“Sarah,” she says, a few days later.

They are doing their daily exercises, walking up and down the length of the room, holding onto the wall for support. She stays right beside him, probably because he has a panic attack whenever she goes more than a foot away. She hasn’t let him touch her since that day.

He crouches down in front of her, legs still unsteady. “It’s a nice name. Was it ours?”

“I don’t know.”

Steve reaches out to comfort her, but she shies away.

 

 

“Sarah,” he tells Helen that evening as she checks him over. “That’s her name.”

Helen raises her eyebrows, but her lips quirk into a small smile. “It’s nice to meet you." She addresses his daemon. The wolf stares at her with dead eyes and turns away.

 

 

“Sarah,” he tells Fury the day the chief comes to pick him up at the infirmary to smooth the transfer to his new home. Fury’s jaguar daemon is slinking off to their right, the distance between her and Fury enough for a echo of remembered pain to shoot through Steve’s chest, making his unsteady heart speed up.

“An unusual name for a daemon,” is Fury’s only comment.

Steve shrugs. “She chose it.”

Steve and Sarah. Sarah and Steve.

It doesn’t feel right to him. But nothing really does.

***

 

Zima is skittish for a while after that, and Steve makes sure to wear his modified gloves whenever he and Sarah visit the clearing. He still remembers the jolt of sensation he felt up in the air as he grabbed on to Zima to stop himself from falling: a dizzying nausea, almost like he was going to throw up. At the same time, he remembers the feeling being in the air gave him: freedom, like he never felt before.

But he mustn't get distracted. He has a goal here. He's working towards something.

A way to end the war.

And for that, he needs Zima’s permission for something that even Steve himself admits is foolishly dangerous. Whatever it comes to, though, he won’t force her. Over the past week he’s come to realize that in her own way, she’s as much of a person as he or Sarah are by themselves when they're apart.

How does one go about getting permission from a dragon, though, is the real question.

“Just ask her, Steve,” Sarah tells him tiredly after working overtime putting out one of Tony’s literal fires. “Zima’s not an idiot.”

“How do you even know she understands our language?”

“Oh, shut up.”

So Steve steels himself and goes to Zima, feeling like a damned fool. The dragon is settled by the edge of the lake, running one claw through the water and watching the ripples flare out. At his approach, she turns and looks at him suspiciously.

He stops a safe distance away.

“Hi.” He feels like an idiot.

Sarah makes and odd chuffing sound somewhere between a growl and a laugh and pads over to the dragon, settling in the cool sand beside her.

Great. Now both of them are judging him.

Steve decides there’s nothing for it. He’ll jump right in.

He tells them his plan, unfolding a piece of parchment with some early sketches and holding it out to Zima. Interest piqued, Zima uncurls herself and pads over, looming over him. He does his best to keep on talking, wincing when she growls at one of the more risky parts, and hurries up, trying to finish it before she decides to bite his head off. “..... So if we can show them that humans and dragons can help one another, can work together, maybe we can start forging some sort of peace.”

There.

He managed to lay it all out without it going sideways. Now all he has to do is wait for Zima’s reaction.

 The dragon dips her head at the parchment and examines it for a few seconds. Steve honestly wouldn’t be surprised if she started asking about the details of his admittedly insane plan, given the fierce intelligence evident in her eyes. Seeming to make up her mind, she backs away a few steps and turns slightly, head stretched out, pointing towards the valley’s wall, darting a sideways glance at him after a few seconds.

Steve looks at the wall of stone.

“I don't understand you - there’s nothing there.”

Zima narrows her eyes. Then she unfolds her wings halfway and starts flapping them slowly, glaring at him while still facing the same direction.

“Okay. Okay…. You want to fly in that direction?”

Zima immediately turns around and leans forward, crooning. Steve looks helplessly at Sarah, but she’s just sitting back on her haunches, tongue lolled out like an oversized Alsatian. She’s enjoying herself, the little shit.

“Um, you can go if you want. I mean, you don’t need our permission or anything.”

The dragon violently shakes herself all over, and then darts forward, grabbing the parchment right out of his hand, nearly giving him a heart attack. She holds it in her mouth and stares him down intently.

“You…. want me to come with you to wherever you want to go?”

She softens her gaze somewhat and unlocks her jaw from around the parchment, letting the damp paper float down to his feet. Then she’s gone, pattering away to where Sarah is settled.

Steve thinks that’s a yes.

 

 

The next morning, early enough that the birds have only just started their daily screaming session, Steve arrives at the forge and repeats part of the process he used for the gauntlets. He gets the same ceramic bowl, the same knife, the same slash across Sarah’s paw - just another one, this time. The same pain, curiously doubled and faded and briefly, more horrible than any sword injury he’s had. A different set of Tony’s undoubtedly priceless notes to bind the cut. He collects the daemon blood in a small vial and leaves, still hours before the time Tony usually shows up.

There are two more stops: the library, where Sam bunks, and had told him ages ago where the key is kept, and the cloth merchant. A couple of hours at the library give him multiple templates of what he needs and buying a long roll of cloth gives him plenty of room for errors.

After his usual workday and scouring of the house, it's time to measure Zima. This goes decidedly less civilly than their last interaction, and his sleeves end up singed, but at the end of the day he has what he needs, and their truce is still in place.

It ends up taking quite a while. Sewing was never his strong suit - at least, he thinks to himself with a wry twist to his mouth, not that he can remember - and the first few pieces come out messy, the stitches uneven and ragged. But this, of all things, is not going to stop him. He tries again. It takes a few sleepless nights, but by the end of the week he has a lightweight cloth saddle with just enough padding that riding won’t be unbearable. The seams are all stitched with the thread he drew through the vial of blood and - as a direct consequence of Tony now keeping a sharp eye on the metal stock after the recent mysterious disappearance of some of his his precious alloy - there are no buckles, only knots of cloth to hold him in place through any turbulence. The first night after it’s done, Sarah rolls herself into it and falls asleep while he works on the inscriptions he’s been avoiding. Steve has to struggle to keep himself awake while she sleeps.

The next day, Zima looks at the saddle warily, but lets him come closer while holding it, sniffing to make sure that he has his metal-threaded gloves on. It's almost as if she recognizes what it is within a few minutes, because after Sarah trots forward to touch noses and greet her, she settles down, allowing him to put it on her back.

The saddle itself is secured in place by two lengths of cloth that circle around her, but Steve has tried his best to make sure that those pieces of cloth are wide and though strong, are as soft as he could get to make sure that they wouldn’t cut or chafe. Zima shuffles around a bit after it's in place, but seems to tolerate it.

Steve waves slightly to get her attention, feeling foolish. “Is it okay? I can still make a few adjustments if you need them.” she eyes him, her expression almost curious, but then in one of those lightning-fast movements of hers that he can’t ever predict, grabs him by the front of his tunic between her jaws.

Steve’s heart, unsteady as it usually is, misses an extra beat or two, and Sarah, sitting a short distance away by the edge of the lake, jumps to her feet.

And then Zima tosses him over her head so that he’s lying, all the wind knocked right out of him, right on top of the saddle.

He has to struggle for breath for a whole minute after that, but by now he’s so used to it that even the panic seems well worn, familiar. He manages to flop onto his stomach and Sarah rests her head on his back, counting in and out. He can’t blame Zima. He doubts that she even knew.

It’s not that bad today. He manages to sit up, center himself, clutching at one of the spines on her back. Zima makes an inquiring clicking sound but otherwise stays absolutely still, letting him get his bearings. Steve knows it's her way of apologizing.

There’s a loose loop going around her neck to serve as makeshift reins of a sort, but that's more to give him something to hold on to. He’ll tug on it if he’s unsure about the direction in which they’re going, but there’s no bridle, no proper reins that would force her to turn her head. He’s not going to direct her like a carthorse. She’s an intelligent living being, and besides, this is the start of a co-operation, a bridge to something better instead the subjugation of one species under the other.

He looks down at Sarah, desolate and alone by herself in the grass. There’s sorrow flowing from her and a mix of anticipation and dread from him. But they’ve decided. It’s worth the cost, worth the risks, worth being apart.

He wonders if it was like this before, and then shakes the thought away.

Steve leans forward. “Ready when you are,” he tells Zima. She spreads her wings, arching high against the cloudless sky, and brings them down.

Then they’re flying.

The world drops away in dizzying lurches as she gains height, rises above the trees, above the hills of Skjoldr, above everything he’s ever known. She feels alive under him, and he wakes up, a bucket of cold water to the stomach, like pulling the thread of a fog apart with his bare hands. And he can see. He can see the island, and the sea stretching out around it and the endless, dizzying dome of the sky stretching out into infinity and the blazing sun above.

And. And it’s like he can breathe. It’s like his lungs have opened up and the horrible, crushing, swampy air that he had been breathing his entire life has given way to pure oxygen, and it’s filling him up, rushing through him. And his bones don’t feel so brittle anymore, they feel strong and hollow, like a bird that’s taken flight. Like a dragon.

He raises his hands and whoops, loud and joyful and clear, feeling like lines of fire are rushing through his veins, like he could conquer the universe. Here, up in the cool, biting air streaked through with sunlight, is where he belongs. This is home.

He knows, without knowing how or why, what to do. His grip settles on his makeshift handholds and he leans into the directions that Zima turns, balancing perfectly, reacting like they are one being, the dragon and the half-human without his soul.

He's here, he thinks fiercely, the wind rushing past him. He's alive.

 

 

It ends all too quickly. Zima wheels around the island once and then circles lower, staying out of sight of the village. Once she’s a safe distance above the clearing Steve slides his feet out of their loops and jumps, rolling expertly as he hits the ground, ignoring the startled yelp from Sarah.

He watches Zima land on her favourite perch. The strength, the energy being in the air gave him, it’s all slowly draining out of him, leaving as weak and helpless as before. The air feels thick as molasses again, syrupy and slimy as it slides down into his lungs, and his heart resumes its unsteady, struggling beat. He feels resentful, for a short second. But, looking at Sarah, padding towards him, he swallows it down. This is what he’s been given. He should accept it, do all with it that he can. It’s no use wondering about what could have been.

He leans against Sarah for support as they head over to Zima. After their burst of sudden strength, his muscles feel worn out and thready, stretching too thin over his bones.

“Hey,” he starts awkwardly. “That was a good start.” Zima is staring at him, looking decidedly unimpressed. Steve gathers his resolve. “We’ll do another few practice rounds, and then we’ll go wherever it is you want to take me.” More staring. “.... Is it very far?”

The dragon huffs and pulls her wings over her head, curling up. Sarah, at his side, nudges him gently. “That’s a no, you dummy."

He knocks into her, marveling at their closeness, the miracle happening in front of his eyes. The steady stitching shut of the gap between them, the building of something new.

"Now let’s go home.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'Zima' = the Russian word for winter


	3. the carvings on the wall

 

> _Lyra sent Pantalaimon, as a fly, to talk to Salcilia on the wall next to their table while she and Roger kept quietly in their separate groups. It was difficult to talk while your daemon's attention was somewhere else, so Lyra pretended to look glum and rebellious as she sipped her milk with the other girls. Half her thoughts were with the tiny buzz of talk between the daemons, and she wasn't really listening, but at one point she heard another girl with bright blond hair say a name that made her sit up._
> 
> _It was the name of Tony Makarios. As Lyra's attention snapped toward that, Pantalaimon had to slow down his whispered conversation with Roger's daemon, and both children listened to what the girl was saying._
> 
> -Northern Lights, _Philip Pullman_

 

 

* * *

 

 

Natasha is of the opinion that Steve is up to something. She’s going to find out what it is.

She likes to keep an eye on Steve. He reminds her, in some small way, of herself, of what she might have been like had the Madame not taken her: a person without the ability or option of fighting, of defending themselves. She likes to think, though, that she would have done what Steve is doing, helped in whatever ways she could, continued to push past the boundaries of what was allowed. But she’ll never know for sure. Her moral compass isn’t quite as straight as his, probably - couldn’t have been from the beginning, or she wouldn’t have done so well against the others.

Maybe it's best that that little girl was lost at sea and never seen again.

But Steve’s been oddly cagey lately. He hasn’t come to sulk near the training enclosure for close to a month, and that's such a red flag she’s surprised she’s been the only one to notice. But she’s quite aware of the extent of her own paranoia, so she’ll give the others a pass. Secondly, whenever she’s seen him in passing glimpses during their respective workdays he seems distracted. And he never hangs around after work, trying to be dutifully helpful despite his obvious disdain for his job.

It’s a fun little mystery to chew on. Nothing next to the network of Fury’s people feeding him information about the status of the war a hundred miles in every direction that she stumbled onto while peeking at his files, or the mystery of the dragons’ strangely coordinated attacks, but it’s a nice distraction.

And what would you know - it’s her day off.

Time for some harmless stalking.

 ***

 

It’s a few days after their first ride. Steve is half-assedly trying to stitch a few pockets for the saddle, watching in quiet amusement as Sarah clambers along Zima, chuckling when her claws hit a chink in the scales and Zima lets out an irritated growl, when there’s a rustling in the trees and Natasha Romanoff stumbles out. The look on her face is murderous.

“What. The fuck.”

Steve reacts almost as fast as she does, and it's only the combined luck of her having a bad angle and the fact that he has a large piece of cloth right in his hand that prevents one of her poison darts hitting Zima.

“Zima, cover and go!” he yells, not looking behind him as he runs towards Natasha, trying to block her angle. “Nat, stop! It's not what you think.”

Natasha’s anger has always been cold, implacable. Now Steve feels the full force of it focused on him as he stands in front of her, using his giant unwieldy piece of cloth as a makeshift shield.

“Get out of my way,” she hisses.

“No, Natasha, give me a chance to explain -”

He’s bodyslammed to the ground, and then his lungs start panicking too, and he’s struggling to breathe through their hollow ache as Natasha wheels around and points her wrist gauntlet to the sky, trying to gauge whether Zima is still in range of her darts.

Vasilii has pounced onto Sarah, and they’re having their own version of the fight between their humans.

Steve sees Natasha squint and aim. Zima is not far enough. She’ll hit her. Through his gasps, Steve reaches out and grabs Natasha’s ankle, pulling her down. He doesn’t quite succeed, but she does have to turn around to pry his grip off, his head knocking right into a rock in the process, sending the world spinning, and now Zima’s a small shadow in the sky, and she’s safe, and Steve hears Sarah give a long, piercing howl, and then his vision fades to black.

 

 

Steve wakes up tied to a tree.

Natasha is standing in front of him, sharpening her dagger. She seems to have gotten control of her immediate anger, and now her expression is one of cool, calculating calm. Steve darts his gaze around wildly. Sarah is curled up at his feet, watching him. He raises an eyebrow, and she gives a small shake of her head. Good. They still have one advantage.

Natasha flips her dagger, bringing his attention back to her. “The only reason I haven’t brought the village down on you is because you deserve a chance to explain. So… explain.”

Steve does. He doesn’t have a choice. And besides … this was part of the plan, after all. Not the ideal way to go about it definitely, but slowly introduce Zima to the more open-minded of the village, let the idea of co-operation trickle in from several sources instead of him having to force it through their heads. He even tells her about what Peggy said, and why he thinks it’ll work.

By the end of his little speech, Natasha is pacing up and down in front of him, rubbing her wrist gauntlets. She seems half-convinced, at the very least.

“Goddammit Rogers, you couldn’t have said anything about this before?”

“I haven’t told anyone yet,” he admits. “Once Zima and I started working together properly I thought I’d bring a few people in.”

She stops, narrows her gaze. “And you aren’t yet?”

He shrugs. “There’s a bit of a communication gap, you know.”

Natasha glares at him halfheartedly. Then her expression turns pensive. “I've never known dragons to be anything other than soulless murderers. So I’ll judge whether this new friend of yours is trustworthy or not for myself.” Steve stills, knowing this is important. Few people in the village remember that Natasha is not a native either, so completely has she integrated herself into its workings. But, when he had first arrived, she told him that she too, was somewhere else, somewhere that Steve knows not to ask about.  “But you’re right. Nothing we’ve tried has worked. Maybe it's time for something new.”

She strides forward to cut the ropes, her dagger held out, when the sky drops down in front of him.

Its Zima.

The dragon lets out a burst of scarlet fire at Natasha that she barely manages to dodge, ducking and rolling as the flames rocket into the lake instead. Steve opens his mouth to tell her to stop, but Sarah is ahead of him, sprinting from his rock to in front of the dragon, yelling in her own voice, a mixture of words and wolf-chatter and that thread of understanding so similar to daemon-speak.

Zima hisses at Natasha, baring her teeth, but quiets down. She whips around her to Steve in the blink of an eye, towering over him, and then darts down, biting through all the ropes at once. And Steve -

Steve, to be honest, freezes up for asplit second. Zima is - Zima is helping him, she thought Natasha was hurting him so she jumped down despite her obvious distrust of humans and broke him free when he thought she was just barely tolerating him for necessity's sake, and now on top of that knowledge he has to deal with the angry dragon completely ready to rip Natasha to shreds, despite not knowing - given the few glimpses he’s had of Natasha’s formidable skill set - whether Zima would actually succeed.

He snaps himself out of it and runs forward. “Zima, stop! It’s alright!” She doesn’t like her touching him so he keeps away, but rounds over to her line of sight, blocking her view of Natasha. Zima growls and snaps at him in annoyance. He can almost hear the _get out of the way, dumbass_ that’s gone unsaid.

He raises his hands, talks in as even a tone as he can manage given the circumstances. “Natasha’s a friend. There was just a misunderstanding, that’s all.”

Zima eyes him for a long moment, gaze flicking between him and Natasha and then snorts in derision, turning away from them both in seemingly complete disinterest. Natasha uncurls from her defensive crouch. Steve goes over to her; she looks okay, but he knows from personal experience that she might have broken a rib and wouldn’t let the pain show at all. He doesn’t insult her by asking.

“I guess,” Natasha says wryly, “that answers the questions of her being trustworthy or not.”

Steve shrugs. “Pretty much.”

Zima hasn’t gone far. She's with Sarah again, who’s having a grand time trying to climb up onto her without slipping. They seem to be having another one of their silent conversations.

“Steve.” Sarah calls. “Zima wants to know if she can have some help.”

“Help with what?”

Sarah gives the canine equivalent of a shrug. “That part is muddled up. But I get the sense it’s something that she can’t do by herself. She'd like Nat to come along too.”

Something finally connects. “Is this where she wanted to take me earlier?”

Another minute of the two creatures silently communicating.

“Yep.”

Okay … that makes sense. He knows that Zima needs a human for whatever’s in that direction, and he also knows that she’s figured out that he isn’t much good on land. Natasha would be of much more help than he ever would.

Steve turns over to her; Natasha’s been following the conversation with the air of an archaeologist collecting data about a newly discovered ruin. “You in?”

She blinks. “I don’t think …. Zima has quite warmed up to me yet.”

Back to Sarah. “Can it wait?”

Instead of answering, Sarah gives a startled yelp as Zima rises to her feet in one fluid, deadly movement and stalks over to him, staring him down, lowering her head so that her bared teeth are directly level with his eyes. Steve guesses that’s a no.

“Fine,” he mutters mutinously, placing one foot in the loops he stitched to support himself and hauling himself up. “But you can’t expect Nat to come along if she doesn’t want to.”  He knows Zima can hear him - the dragon’s hearing is almost as good as Sarah’s.

Zima’s response to this is to initiate another death stare match with Natasha. Steve has to hold back a groan.

“Come on, you two” he says after a minute of unbroken glaring. “Natasha, please. This is something we can do to gain her trust. And Zima - “he raps her on one of the spines along her back with his gloved hand - “we’d like to make a good impression.”

Zima shifts restlessly, beating her wings slightly, but breaks her gaze, twisting her neck to fix an eye on him for a second to show exactly how grudgingly she’s doing it.  Natasha gives the dragon another deeply suspicious look but eventually climbs up behind him, Vasilii clinging to her shoulder.

“What about Sarah?” she says once she’s settled, concern surprisingly clear in her tone.

Steve doesn’t turn, but a jolt of adrenaline runs through him as he braces for her response, lets her see another secret. “It won’t be an issue.”

“О Боже мой,” he hears her whisper. Her hands tighten on his waist. “You’re separated.”

“Yes."

“How?”

“I don’t remember.” He tries very hard not to meet Sarah's gaze as she stands by herself on the ground, watching silently, resigned to what's about to happen next.

He is saved the trouble of further interrogation by Zima taking off.

There’s the familiar swooping feeling low in his stomach as gravity drops away and then returns, the rush of power through his limbs, the feeling like he finally belongs in his body. He thinks it’ll never get old, flying up and up and up into the infinite air stretching out above them, but at the same time it’s like coming home, like coming back to a warm hearth and a fresh-cooked meal, like slipping into his own skin. The feeling of Natasha’s grip tightening further is somehow far away, and instead he feels the steady pull in his - in _Zima’s_ \- wings, the ice-cold air moving in and out of her lungs. The beat of her - his - their hearts in time as they pull themselves forward, sharing strength, sharing senses, angling into the headwind, towards the call of the leader, towards the piece left behind.

Wings beating, they head towards the beacon of - not home, but something else, something important, and after an endless stretch of time, they’ve crossed islands, they’ve arrived at the boundary of the world he knows: a solid wall of fog rising up from the ocean.

Natasha’s yelling something in his ear. It takes him a minute to come back to his body, to remember that he’s a single person, to piece the words together. She’s saying: I know this place.

“How?” he shouts back.

“It’s where the dragons who attack us come from.”

The mist rises up in front of them, an impenetrable wall, Zima hovering in front of it for a brief moment before she slips into it like the shadow she is - easily, quietly. He holds on, ducking, bending with her movements. She knows where she’s going. She wants to show him something. They manoeuvre through the fog cautiously, focusing on silence over speed before they gradually slow down and Steve senses that they've stopped, hovering above something vast below them, something Steve can only catch the barest glimpses of in the fog.

Then - a rush. Wings are everywhere, flapping to keep aloft, displacing the mist. Dragons, hundreds of them, crowding the air. Steve ducks down against Zima and feels Natasha do the same behind him, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible.

Zima lets out a clicking sound, swaying slightly to avoid being clipped by the others and then tilts, pointing her nose downwards, and then they’re hurtling towards a rapidly appearing, far off red glow that grows bigger and bigger, resolving itself into the crater of a volcano, the hellish circle growing to encompass their vision until it swallows them up.

They enter the crater in the flurry of the other creatures who settle above the lava into crevices and narrow ledges set into the walls. Where there’s no space, some of them cling onto the sheer rock face itself. Zima manages to find an empty outcropping set slightly farther back than the rest and lands silently on it, immediately retreating as far back as she can from the mouth of the crater.

 Silent as a ghost, Steve feels Natasha slide off behind him, and he does too, copying her smooth movements as best as he can. There’s something about the glow coming from the crater - something’s down there. Something ancient that radiates malice and intent so strong Steve can feel it, almost knocked over by the strength of its will, its _hunger_.

Natasha pulls him back from the edge.

“What are you doing?” 

Steve blinks. He has no idea how he got there. Something - something was calling him. He gives a bewildered shrug. Natasha inclines her head to a dark opening behind where Zima is curled up, trembling slightly. “I think the dragon wanted us to go in there. You stay here, though, if you’re getting lightheaded.”

This is a dragon lair. Steve feels none of the usual weakness he does on the ground.

“I’m coming with you,” he says.

Natasha glares at him, but he can see her weighing the odds. “Stay behind me.”

He quickly agrees.

The main crater leading down to the volcano - well, the walls are literally crawling with dragons. But the side vents through the granite, too small for any of the creatures, are empty. They make their way into the depths of the vent network, Steve trying to match Natasha’s and Vasilii’s unnatural silence. A dim, ruddy glow from the far-off lava lights their way.

Then - they reach a doorway along the corridor wall. An honest to gods, human sized doorway carved out of stone. Natasha looks back at Steve, eyebrows raised. Steve returns a look of his own.

They go in.

Steve can’t see much at first, but as his vision adjusts the room comes into view. There’s nothing much in it, really. What looks like rusted chains piled in a corner. Shards of something that might have been a plate in another. And then Steve sees the walls.

It's a jumbled mess of carvings, smoothed over by age. Somebody was here, maybe decades ago. Somebody who carved and carved, maybe with a sharp rock, maybe with the shards of china lying in the corner, until their fingers bled, until the walls were a mass of murals, untouchable by time. Steve runs his fingers over the lines. There’s a bird. Stick figures, clustered together. A gazelle, lovingly detailed. And after that: a wolf, head tilted back, howling at the sky. Letters, painstakingly carved below it in old-fashioned handwriting: A-L-E-T-H-E-I-A. Truth, Steve thinks out of nowhere. A tug at his heart.

A box, drawn again and again. M-Y N-A-M-E I-S, left unfinished. A cat, head held high.

The next carving might have been a dragon, once. Its scribbled out, vicious slashes across its face, its entire body. There’s a name below this one too, but this has been erased so thoroughly that he could fit one of Natasha’s darts in the gouges.

There are tally marks, wavering wildly all over the place, stopping and starting randomly.

Steve presses his palm to the wall, breathing in.

Whoever was in this room - well.

They must be long dead by now.

 

 

“Steve,” Natasha says softly from behind him. “We should move on.”

He slips out of the room behind her.

 

 

The next room is very different.

There’s a desk with papers lying on it. Shelves. A map pinned to the rocky wall. A burning torch in a bracket on the wall. Steve and Natasha exchange another glance, but this time it's more serious. The torch means that someone uses this place _now_. Not abandoned, not decades ago - this is an actively working human headquarters right inside a dragon nest.

“You keep guard,” Natasha whispers, slipping over to the desk and examining what’s on it.

“But-”

“Can you read this?” She holds up a sheaf of papers. It’s not in any language he’s seen before - but somehow, impossibly, he can read it.

“Yes,” he says, trying to keep the uncertainty out of his tone.

In all this danger and madness, Steve thinks that this is the first time he’s seen Natasha genuinely surprised.

“Huh. Okay.” She shoves the sheaf at him and goes to rifle through the shelves, sending Vasilii scurrying off to stand by the door. The distance between the two of them makes Steve wince, but he sees no sign of discomfort in either one.

He turns his attention to the papers. The ink is fresh - no more than a year old, though it's certainly no language he can ever remember seeing. Another gift from himself, through time. It’s a … record, of sorts. Of past attacks. On different villages. Heart pounding, Steve takes in the names of the targets, sees Skjoldr on the list, the dates of the last three dragon raids, the number of casualties, the ... loot recovered? He turns to the next page. More listings - of _attacks that haven’t happened yet._

Steve stops short, and then starts flipping through the pages as fast as he can, taking as much information in as possible. Slowly, he pieces it together:

The war between dragons and humans is manufactured.

 

 

After too little time, Vasilii makes a soft clicking noise. Steve glances up. Natasha’s face has gone deadly serious. “We need to run,” she says lowly, only pausing to let Vasilii clamber onto her shoulder before ghosting towards the door. Steve follows as fast as he can, putting the sheaf of papers back where they were, making sure that there’s no sign that they’ve been in the office, before he follows them into the dark.

The footsteps are coming from a second passageway branching from the crater, and Natasha leads Steve away as fast as they can without making noise, slipping back towards Zima. As they come closer to the main cavern, the muffled roaring of the lava deepens to -something else.

They break into a run.

Zima has moved from where they left her, she’s now huddled at the very edge of the outcropping, looking as upset as Steve’s ever seen her, peering over to the opposite side of the cavern. And over there - the other dragons are congregating in a writhing mass of bodies, sending out bursts of fire and roars, screeching in distress as they’re thrown back by - something. Steve stares, heart pounding. That is - bad. It is unacceptable. There should be no dissent in the ranks. There should never be a single claw-wing-tooth out of place. There should be ORDER. Who dares to break free? Who dares challenge him? The pathetic Halfling WILL be subdued.

He’s stretching out his necks, and - what? A touch on his elbow startles Steve, pulling him out of the dark hole he was spiraling into. He gasps, realizing that he hadn’t been breathing for the past minute.

“What’s that?” he manages.

“Our chance to escape,” Natasha says brusquely and pushes him forward.

Steve tears his gaze away, pulls himself back to his own body and climbs onto Zima, holding a hand out for Natasha. She slaps him away and gets on by herself, sliding in place behind him in a single smooth movement.

Zima is still looking distressed, straining towards the scuffle, but Steve places a hand - still gloved - on her side, ignoring the pull of whatever it was, half-convinced that he had imagined it. “Zima, come on. We have to tell the other about this. We can’t bring this hellhole down by ourselves.”

Zima growls, a low rumble lost in the distant screeching across the cavern. Then she whines, doubling over.

Steve leans over her, keeping his voice low and calm. “You can do this. You were strong enough to show us this place. You are strong enough to do this.”

Zima shivers and straightens, the odd spasm occasionally running through her. Then she spreads her wings and takes off, winging her way towards the mouth of the crater.

As they hurtle upwards, the sounds of the fight die down, the scuffle that had erupted abruptly ending.

They leave the crater behind.

 

 

Both Steve and Natasha are silent on the way back. There’s not much to say. The horror of what they’ve seen is still fresh, still not fully sunk in. When they land, Sarah bounds over to Steve, knocking him over now that he doesn’t have the balance he did in the air. She nuzzles his face, and he grabs on to her, clutching with all the strength he has left.

“I was so worried.”

He runs a hand along her back. Zima is huddled in her favorite corner. “I know.”

He’s looking up at the sky. It’s a beautiful night.

“Who do you want to trust with this?” Natasha asks, later.

Steve knows who he’d choose, but he also knows that Natasha’s been here longer, knows the people better, would be a better judge the him. “You’d know better than I would.”

She shrugs. “I’m not so good with trust.”

“Well,” he says, trying his best to convey that he understands the weight of the gift she’s given him. “I trust you.”

Natasha is quiet for a minute. He thinks he can see her smile.

“Sam,” she says eventually.

“Sam,” Steve agrees. He’s steady, dependable, and he’s also absolutely ready to throw down if the need arises. It’s a good choice.

 

***

Time is changing.

It's turning inside out, stretching, stretching so that eternity is compressed into seconds into minutes into tick-tick-tick, breaths in and out.

There’s- energy? Buzzing. Flashes of a lake, grey fur, blond hair.

The pack goes hunting. In the screaming, there is a two-leg that falls downdowndown into the water. In the midst of the fire, its nestmates throw out a line reel it out, slowly steady, until it lies gasping on the shore. 

That.

That is what is happening. He is being reeled upwards, closer and closer to air.

He can almost breathe. Almost.

 

 

For now, he is still in the depths. With the voices and the red, spilling around him, burning up in the fire. And they are telling him to kill.

He does. How could he not? He has no will of his own left, not with the many-heads pushing their way into his skull through - through _her_.

 

 

A dream: hands on him that didn’t hurt.

 

 

The motions of everyminute. Every - day?

( _Why does it matter, we’re stuck here forever,_ and he claws at his left hand, trying rip out the metal. Get it out. _Get it out._ )

Back to base, back to base with the horde. Wings, blotting out the lights in the sky. And then: the fog.

But - something different. Time solidifies, gets packaged between heartbeats into neat little slices like the cuts of a sword.

The soldier raises his head. He can feel-

He can feel.

A dragon? No.

But she’s here. _He_ is here. He can feel it.

There is a sword in his hand. It is red. Dripping down onto the floor, down the walls.

A little more red, that is all. And then it will end.

He wants it to end.

The pack is blocking his way. But he is fast, and strong, and though not a dragon, he is not human anymore either. He cuts through them, and they pounce on him, and they rip and they tear and they bite, but he is going to make it _end_ , and the fire in him echoes in the cavern, and then he is a dragon, and his claws are sharp, and he is watching himself fight from far away, fight with his tiny human limbs against the rise of the oncoming tide.

It isn’t enough.

The dragon, she wants to escape. But there’s no saving the both of them, no way there will be and end for him and an out for her, not at the same time.

The soldier makes a decision.

A wrenching tug against his consciousness, and he slips out of the world. The strength leaves his limbs; the sword clatters out of his hands. They pin him down, crowding over him, hungry, always hungry.

But he isn’t there anymore.

He is flying. He is free.

 ***

 

Steve and Natasha slink over to the library. It’s the dead of the night, dawn only a couple of hours away. Steve takes out the key from its hiding place and unlocks the heavy wooden door, feeling a strange sense of Deja vu. This time though, instead of heading to the dusty shelves he takes the winding staircase upwards to Sam’s - and previously, Riley’s - room.

Sam’s not very happy to be woken up.

Natasha sits with him and brings him halfway up to speed while Steve puts together a cup of fika and shoves it under Sam’s nose; Sam gulps it down in seconds. Steve winces.

Sam turns to him. “Pinch me.”

“Uh… excuse me?”

“Do it.”

Steve, hesitantly, pinches his outstretched arm. Sam yelps, and then buries his head in his hands. “Gods, I wanted to be dreaming.”

Steve exchanges a nonplussed look with Natasha. Sam raises his head and looks at Steve with bleary eyes. “You’ve been hiding a dragon.”

Steve squares his shoulders. “Yes.”

“And you found out why they’re raiding us so much with the help of this dragon.”

“Yes.”

Sam buries his head in his hands for a moment and then looks at Natasha. “I’m in.”

 

 

Natasha tells the two of them what she’s found. In a way, it’s worse than what Steve saw in the papers he examined. The papers she looked through had details about the people running the operation - nothing identifying them outright, but enough to narrow it down once the information was handed out to Fury’s network of spies - something Steve is somehow not surprised to find out about. Their basic goal was - as Steve had suspected, to sow chaos, let the clans destroy one another, and then swoop in afterwards to claim power. She also found a letter, addressed by an A. Pierce to a member of the organization named Crossbones detailing their so far erratically successful ‘dual subject’ and how many new dragons the ‘hydra’ had managed to force under its control. Sam, who spent a good part of the year after Riley died buried in his books, interjects - 

“Wait. An actual hydra?”

Natasha grimaces. “I think it's a codename. Hydras were a myth.”

 Sam shakes his head. “No, they were real, alright. This girl from Lekeplassen, she was doing some research on them, sent over a copy to the library here. They were incredibly rare, thought to have gone extinct a couple of hundred years ago.”

Natasha sits back. “Well. That explains it.”

Steve raises his eyebrows. “Explains what.”

She takes her time to respond. When she does, there’s a small, self-deprecating twist to her lips. “Both of you know I’m not from here. I’ve had …. shall we say, some _experience_ with alpha dragons. But even they have a limit to their power, and the numbers I under this one’s sway saw were far too large. But if it was a hydra …” she trails off.

Steve understands where she’s going. “They have more than one head. More raw brainpower behind the commands. More control.”

“Exactly.”

Sam is rolling a pencil between his fingers. “I haven’t heard your part in these shenanigans, Steve, after the bit where you flew on a fucking dragon.”

Steve tells them both the bare bones, leaving out his weird out of body experience just before they escaped. He wants to get a chance to process that himself first.

After he’s done, there’s a minute of silence.

“Shit.” Sam’s stands up, arms crossed tightly. “So Riley -”

Steve stays where he is. “We have a chance to make it right.” He sees Sam take a couple of deep breaths.

“Yeah,” he says quietly.

Natasha is looking down, twisting strands of hair absently between her fingers. Steve turns to her.

“You alright?”

She gives another one of her small, lopsided smiles. “I’ve been looking at the data for a while now. I could see that there was some sort of pattern. I could see that something was off. I just couldn’t my finger on what it was.”

Sam raises his gaze. “Nat. That’s not a bad thing.”

She shrugs, clearly unconvinced.

Sam eyes her for a second, but then claps his hands together, clearly deciding that that’s a battle for another day. “Alright. What’s the plan?”

They sit in the library until dawn figuring it out.

 

 

The plan goes something like this. Steve and Sam take point, presenting the proposal at the village hall, Steve mainly because he’s the only person crazy enough to have come up with it and Sam is the one who can give him enough credibility for it to be taken seriously. Natasha, will push for a less extreme - but no less effective - version if it looks like things will go south, and will subtly back them up if it looks like it might go either way. If even that doesn’t work, Clint is their secondary backup; Natasha’s given him next to no information about the hows and whys, but being the night guard he’s placed optimally to break them into the dragon enclosure and has plenty of enthusiasm about doing so.

The plan is solid. It doesn’t quite feel like it when being explained to a few dozen highly-strung skeptical villagers. Steve knows he can pull a good enough speech out of his ass on the spur of the moment - it’s a sadly proven fact that preparation only makes him worse - but that doesn’t make it any less nerve wracking to lay it all out in front of them. But he truly believes that the people of Skjoldr are not too far gone to listen to reason and hope, not too far gone to remain entrenched in their ways, to turn away from the atrocities being committed. And he’s determined to lay all the facts out in front of them. He can’t force them into making this decision - he’s going to do his part with or without their permission - but having the support of the village would mean the difference between a fly attacking an elephant or a lioness attacking the same.

Fury steeples his fingers, expression unchanged as he speaks, as Sam stands up from his seat - formerly Riley’s - at the leaders’ table to vouch for him. His only, final question to Steve once he has finished laying out the sequence of events and what they found in the dragon nest is this: “And what do you suggest we should do?”

“Open the dragon cages.”

There’s a deathly silence. Then everyone bursts into chatter, only the chief looking at him, waiting.

Maria slams her hands down onto the table when the furor shows no sign of dying down.

“Everybody quiet!”

Slowly, the noise subsides. She turns to Steve. “Go on.”

Steve takes a breath. His knuckles are white in Sarah’s fur. “The dragons, they’re not mindless beasts. They can think and feel as much as our daemons can, and they want peace as much as we do. The group that’s raiding us, been raiding us for the past few years – it’s the only faction of dragons that are still fighting. It just seems like more because they’ve been attacking us and the neighboring villages so often. And the only reason they’re still doing it is because they’re being enslaved by humans, humans who want to benefit from the chaos and the discord between the tribes. We need to free the dragons that we’ve imprisoned, work together with them to end it.”

Maria studies him, holding the room in silence with the force of her gaze. “And who will vouch for this plan?”

Natasha steps forward.

“I will.”

She tells the village why it’ll work, lays out her reasoning so clearly and concisely that Steve is convinced that not even the most bullheaded person in the room is not giving their idea serious thought after her speech. He can’t believe this is the same person ruthlessly shooting at Zima only yesterday.

Once she’s done, Maria doesn’t need to keep the room quiet anymore. Short conversations between villagers flare up and die as people discuss the viability of their proposed plan, whether they should even go through with it, whether they can believe the three youngsters.”

Tony’s drumming his fingers on the table in a complicated, thoughtless rhythm. “I’m convinced.”

Maria addresses the room. “Anyone else want to offer evidence in support or against?”

“Yeah,” Clint chimes in. giving Natasha what Steve personally thinks is an extremely unsubtle wink. “I work from a distance; I can identify the dragons. It’s always the same ones. Every time. Their stuff works out. I’m in.”

Kebo speaks up from the back. “We should just burn the nest down to the ground. Problem solved.”

The scattered cheers at that make Steve grit his teeth. He turns to Fury, who’s been silent this whole time. “You need to tell them. Compartmentalization won’t work anymore.”

Fury looks at him coolly for a moment. He doesn't insult Steve by pretending ignorance about what he's referring to. Then he addresses Wanda. “What does the representative of our elder have to say about this?”

Steve still doesn’t know whether the dancing red in Wanda’s eyes is a trick of the light, or something else. “It’s time,” she says, and so the story of how humans and dragons from this very village successfully worked together before unravels.

 

 

It takes a month.

A month of training, of slowly rehabilitating the chained dragons, giving them the time to trust their humans, work with them. A month of Fury sending out whispers to the other village: this is when they will attack; be ready. A month of Steve watching and teaching and helping and guiding with Zima at his side, Sarah standing beside him.

It looks like hope.

Only Sam and Natasha know about Steve and Sarah’s secret. It would be too much of a distraction for the rest of them, and it's not something he's ready to give up yet. So only those trained warriors with small or flight-capable daemons train with the dragons: Sam with Redwing. Natasha and Vasilii. Clint. Hope. Scott. Even Ayo and Daisy, ambassadors from two other villages join in. Danvers. Rhodey.

Rhodey walks with a brace on his leg. But he takes to the air like a daemon who’s just settled, owning his surroundings completely. He and his dragon, an old grizzled veteran of the cages, get along like a house on fire. Tony stays on the ground, arming and planning for the ground troops, watching his best friend fly.

The days rush past faster and faster, hurtling towards the date chosen to attack: Thor’s day, three nights before the papers Steve saw detailed a raid on Skjoldr, the night immediately after an attack on Lekeplassen. A warning to the village had been sent out, but Fury insisted on not sending them any help - now that they knew a human group was behind all this, it wouldn’t do to make them suspicious. The lack of action didn’t sit well with Steve, but Zima absolutely refused to take him and proceeded to convince all the other dragons not to take him either, so that was that.

 

 

Then: the day of the attack.

The boats set off at dawn, carrying almost half the village. Tony’s upgraded their weapons. Fury is in the boats too, but he’s in the second wave, able to keep an eye on the state of the battle and direct the troops.

The dragon riders start in the early afternoon. Steve has to sneak off to prevent everyone seeing him take off without Sarah, but he thinks Wanda catches a glimpse of him; she just smiles and turns away.

Sam is the one who gives the riders their motivational speech, not Steve. He deserves it as much as any of them do.

Steve rejoins the others in the air, a rolled up cloth in front of him on Zima - it might pass as Sarah all bundled up from a distance, but it won’t hold up at close quarters. The cloth actually covers something else - something Steve found only days ago, buried underneath an avalnche of old projects in Tony's workshop.

When they reach the fog, it's dusk. Below them, the ships are waiting, their sails looking like swans’ wings from their view in the sky. Steve and Zima dive down, relishing in the thrill, the precision of the movement, waiting for the exact moment for Steve to lean back and Zima to flare her wings, hovering a few feet above the ocean in front of the armada. Steve can hear a few suppressed gasps from the ships at their show - staying close to Sarah during training somewhat limited how much he was able to do in front of the rest of them.

He and Zima lead them in.

The riders follow above, their silent winding movements through the air eerily echoing the clumsier manoeuvring of the ships as they avoid the rocky outcroppings and the ruins of previous vessels.  Sam and his dragon scout ahead, making sure that the nest hadn’t spotted them yet.

They’re almost within sight of the island when it happens.

Sam’s dragon swoops back towards them, followed by an ominous rumbling from the direction of the island.

“They’ve seen us!” Sam yells.

All hell breaks loose.

The riders scatter just as the volcano seemingly erupts, a vortex of dragons flying out from the central crater, the smaller crevices on the slope, turning the featureless sky into a storm of wings. An alarm blares from the ships and from the corner of his eye Steve can see the ant-like figures jump into motion, arming and priming the catapults just before the swarm of dragons hits him.

Steve has his dagger in his sheath. But his first instinct, despite the month of hands-on training Natasha and May have been giving him in using it is to completely ignore it, instead reaching into the cloth case in front of him and pulling out the shield he found.

It feels right in his hands. Heavy, but not too heavy, and perfectly balanced, no imperfections on its surface. The edge is a smooth line, a weapon in itself. It slides onto his wrist perfectly, the straps settling onto his bracers in a familiar weight.

And then the dragons are on them, and there is no more thinking. He and Zima move as one, sliding into that that zone where they feel like an extension of each other, their energy forming a perfect feedback loop. They roar and attack, Steve moving seamlessly with Zima as she claws at the other dragons, protecting her wing and flank from his perch on her back. They see the other riders engage, heading toward he mountain from the too, forming a shrinking ring around the mouth of the crater, Steve and Zima the most agile of the group, focusing on defending the others from unseen attacks, swooping into their blind spots, and barely five minutes later, there - two riders have made it in. Sam and Sharon. They’ll be the ones facing the hydra.

It’s like a switch has been flipped. Simultaneously, the moment Sam breached the mouth of the crater, all the dragons freeze, and then like a great line is reeling them in, circle back towards the mountain, ignoring the cries of their wounded brethren, blind to the boats attacking them from below. Steve catches Natasha’s eyes and they exchange a panicked glance. Right now, the inside of the mountain is probably empty except for the hydra. That gives Sam and Sharon a fighting chance. If the other dragons from the nest make it in - it’ll be a death trap.

“Back to the edge!” Steve yells, and he and the remaining riders retreat right to the mouth of the crater, landing on the rocky edge and setting up a line of defense to give Sam and Sharon more time. He sees Scott briefly swoop into the crater and back out.

“They’re doing fine!” Scott yells, climbing back onto his dragon. “Tony’s found an entrance from the ground and Fury’s troops are giving them ground support.”

Okay. 

Okay.

Steve breathes in.

Steve breathes out.

The shield moves almost on its own, knocking an approaching dragon away.

Okay then. The others are dealing with the hydra. This is his job. He’ll be the shield. He’ll give them the time to defeat the monster.

He and Zima have landed on a small plateau. From above, the enslaved dragons are spiralling downwards, spewing fire, claws outstretched. Zima, the biggest of the dragons they’re riding, forms too big a target. Steve deftly hops off in a brief reprieve from the attack having given Natasha the signal to cover for him, hoping, praying - and yes, no adrenaline crash, no weakness returning to his limbs. He puts his hand to the side of Zima’s neck and she startles, turning towards him.

“Go,” he says.

She understands.

Zima takes off, now unburdened with the weight of a rider, and tears through the oncoming horde grabbing the smaller ones between her teeth and tossing them, dazed, down, directing bursts of scarlet fire into the bigger ones’ mouths. In the air, she isn’t a sitting duck for their attacks anymore.  Steve deals with the stragglers that slip past her, keeping an eye on the flow of the battle, calling out audibles to the other riders when he sees an opening, a better way to stave off the horde. Their goal isn’t to kill _these_ dragons - it’s just to keep them off, give the people inside enough time to defeat the great dragon inside. The pack is swarming back towards the volcano from all directions, the riders keeping out the ones coming from above, the boats and their fiery catapults keeping out the ones coming from the sides and the villagers dealing with the ones on the ground.

Briefly, he sees Daisy slip into the volcano as the ring of riders shrinks even further, the enslaved dragons becoming scattered, confused as whatever’s going on inside starts to work. She and her dragon fly back out minutes later, smoking slightly, coughing.

The riders take turns like that, dipping into the cavern to give an assist to Sam and Sharon, all of them except Steve, who’s dragon is up in the air, doing the work of a set of four riders, blazing with fire and fury, and him, down on the ground, using his shield with the dexterity born of years’ experience, dodging blasts of fire, hurling it towards the oncoming horde at just the right angle to send it right back into his hands, ready to serve as a battering ram or a projectile once again, his senses expanding outwards, blood singing in his veins.

Then: a shift in the battle. The circle of riders is ever shrinking, allowing a couple more to go to Sam’s aid. Steve can hear what he thinks is the hydra now, both its deafening roars of fury and the tug at his consciousness, the bellowing, impossible to block out command: COME TO ME. DEFEND ME. KILL.

KILL.

He grabs hold of the thread of the outgoing command in his mind and warps it, toning down the kill and switching the defense command to target his riders, and echoes this version outwards to Zima, to their dragons. He doesn’t know if it works. But he can feel it - the initial sureness of victory that the hydra had is fading, and now it's no holds barred: the enslaved dragons - though reduced in numbers - are attacking with renewed fury, and out of the corner of his eye he sees Natasha land on the edge of the crater too, the circle of dragons grown too small to accommodate her in the air.

 

 

A figure emerges from the mouth of the tunnel.

Steve catches sight of it - him? - in flashes, caught in his own skirmish. Its human, clad from head to toe in black, a mask covering the lower half of his face. There is no daemon in sight, but that - that’s not possible. There is no human without a daemon. Steve’s mind shies away from the fact, the very possibility of it. His daemon must be small, easily concealed, an insect or a moth, out of sight, hidden beneath the buckles across his chest. Certainly not severed - the very horror of considering it makes him shiver in the midst of his fight-  not with the intent, murderous way the soldier zeroes in on Steve and starts stalking towards him. Steve realizes with the small part of his brain analyzing every detail that the black is leather armor. Made from dragon hide.

Fury washes over him. This must be one of the people who organised this bloodshed, aimed to benefit from the chaos and ruin. Finally coming out to fight face to face instead hiding behind thousands of slaves. Steve doesn’t want to kill anyone, but for this person - he would make an exception.

He puts his current adversary out of commission and starts running towards the figure to engage, but Natasha gets there first. Steve is almost taken back by the expression on her face, one of such grief and anger that he stops for a split second, frozen, enough time for her to somersault onto the soldier's shoulders and pull a garrote wire around his neck.

There’s no time to waste. Steve takes on the remaining hydra’s dragons that slip through the ring of riders, keeping one eye on Natasha and her battle with the soldier and one eye on Zima, who circles lower and lower as more riders dive into the heart of the mountain or spread out to assist the villagers on the ground.

He knocks out three dragons, hurting them only enough that they’ll be useless for the rest of the battle, when Zima lands. They have a wordless exchange: they are tired, they are in their element, they will not stop until their fight is over.

He engages again. The dragons are back in their never-ending swarm, and though it feels like they’ve been fighting for years it cannot have been more than half an hour, time slipping away as Steve feels the strength of the hydra’s call wax and wane as the battle below progresses. The enslaved creatures are now directly landing on the rock face, slithering their way up to where he and Zima are forming their line of defense, Natasha still locked in combat with the soldier.

It’s one moment. One slip. Steve sees Natasha thrown off, the soldier’s sword skitters off to one side and falls. The soldier draws another from the sheath across his back, a curved, gleaming scimitar that he swings from side to side with deathly grace, one arm of his catching the light oddly - Steve realizes that it must be separately armored. Natasha rolls to her feet, ready for the next bout, but Steve sees what she doesn’t, with her attention fully on the soldier: the many-winged beast approaching her from behind, fire glowing deep in its throat.

Steve gives a wordless cry to Zima, bringing the shield down on his current opponent and turning, running as fast as he can, praying that he’ll reach the soldier before either he or the dragon manage to engage Natasha -

And he gets to the masked figure just in time, holding up his shield and bracing as the gleaming arm comes down on him instead. Natasha engages with her new opponent, hopping back onto her dragon, and Steve is left to deal with the soldier, a person without any qualms about enslaving an entire race, about causing the death of hundreds. He feels a rush of rage, twisting the shield to the right, letting the soldier’s arm slide off, and then ducking to the side, bringing the edge down, only for it to be blocked, a knife slipping under the edge that he has to twist to avoid.

This guy is _fast_.

The knife comes down again on the shield and Steve takes a step back to block it, trying to catch an angle that will make it slip off easily, automatically recalculating the variables to account for the fact that the soldier’s strength nearly matches his at the moment.

He spins around, kicking the soldier in the chest, sending him off balance and nearly flaying backwards. As Steve takes advantage of the opening, he catches sight of Zima pausing oddly, her movements slow and sluggish as she turns away from her own fight to look at him and the soldier.

“Zima, focus!” he yells, ducking away from one of the soldier’s scimitars coming down, the moment of advantage lost, and feels the heat from a rush of fire over his head as the dragon roars, pushing her challengers back.

At the same moment, the soldier stumbles.

Steve takes advantage of the minute hesitation, getting closer to the soldier, blocking one hand with the shield and deftly squeezing the other hand’s wrist, twisting it until the soldier gives a pained yell, his eyes coming back into focus above the dark mask. He twists his hand out of Steve’s grip, not going for the fallen dagger as Steve had expected, but instead aiming a punch at his nose. Steve has to shift the shield away to block it, and now the other hand is coming towards him, knife flipping expertly from a forward grip to a reverse grip. Steve edges backwards, trying to find an opening, and now he’s level with Zima, and he can see the dragon just - she’s just _standing_ there, moving in slow motion, a glazed look in her eyes. She doesn’t even seem to notice the malevolent little spitfire edging towards her victoriously, maw open wide.

“Zima!” Steve shouts, momentarily taking his attention off the soldier, even though he can see him gearing up for another blow -it’s alright, he can take it, but Zima, she needs to wake up, get moving.  He can see the dragon shudder back to normal, ducking around to snatch up her attacker in between her jaws and throwing it into the rock face. Steve turns his attention back to his own battle, fully expecting the knife to be coming down, but instead now the soldier is staggering backwards, a confused look in his eyes, the scimitar lowered.

_What the hell is going on?_

Steve straightens slightly out of his defensive stance, assessing the soldier. In front of him, diagonally off to the left he can see Zima dispatching the last of her foes. She turns towards him, grinning her terrifying victorious smile, and that's when the soldier comes back to life.

If Steve was on the ground proper, he’d be dead.

As it is, he just manages to duck away, but the soldier has a firm grip on the shield and wrenches on it, painfully pulling it off Steve’s arm and using the momentum to twist around and try and bring it down on his head. Steve reacts equally fast though, pulling his as-yet-unused dagger out of his belt and using the flat of it to block the downwards blow. In front of him, he hears Zima roar, approaching the soldier from behind to grab him by the scruff of his uniform, and Steve darts to the side, letting the shield cleave through the space where he was seconds ago, twisting around the dagger so that it is aimed squarely at the joints in the soldier’s armored arm to disable it.

That’s not where it hits.

The soldier - doesn’t move like Steve was expecting him to. He doesn’t even move at all. He’s frozen like a wax statuette as the hulking figure of the dragon approaches him unnoticed from behind. And, as if in slow motion, the dagger slides in, neatly, cleanly, through his torso, almost up to the hilt. The sound it makes is -

The soldier lets out a horrible, choked off sound. His glazed eyes dart upwards to meet Steve’s, coming into focus, bright with fear and pain, and Steve can only stare back frozen, fingers numb. The soldier drops to his knees -

      - and behind him, the movement is echoed by Zima.

Steve thinks, for a second, that something from inside the crater has struck Zima, a projectile, a firebomb from the attackers. But then a flash of fire from the fighters above lays it all out in terrible detail:

The sounds of fighting from within the crater; Sharon and Sam’s and the others' war cries mixing with the deafening roars of the many-headed Hydra. The moonless sky above, flashing with bursts of fire as Natasha and Clint defend the villagers with their dragons. And him and Zima and the masked soldier, all alone on their tiny plateau.

 

The soldier drops to the ground, convulsing slightly, and Zima lets out a heartrending keen as she staggers, her edges wavering in the darkness, clawing her way towards the spasming figure, limping as if she was the one who had been stabbed, not the soldier. The soldier falls still and she drops to the ground beside him, curling in on herself, near-invisible wisps of Dust floating off her.

And Steve understands.

He had thought the soldier had an insect daemon.

He had thought the soldier was daemonless, a remnant wasting away.

No. No, the truth is a thousand times worse

    -  _trapped them in forms not their own, and then they were cut away from their humans_ -

Zima.

Zima is a daemon. She is somehow, impossibly, the _soldier’s_ daemon.

This was what she was trying to show him.

And Steve has killed her.

Steve has killed _them_.

Below him, the soldier lies still on his back, hands scrabbling feebly at the ground as Steve watches, the world moving in slow motion. A small trickle of blood winds its way out the corner of the soldier’s mouth, his eyes rolling in his head, resting briefly on Steve before slipping away, searching for something - someone to save him.

There’s so much blood.

The battle - the battle is still going on around him. But Steve can’t -

Natasha hurls into him, her small, strong body knocking him backwards, jolting the world back into motion. Dazedly, he tears his gaze away from the unconscious soldier, to Natasha, who’s shouting something rendered incomprehensible by the roaring in his ears. He pulls himself back into the world, trying to focus on the shape of her words, the dim backdrop of her dragon facing the remaining pack alone, Rhodey flying out of the crater to help.  

“- Zima up! Steve! Are you listening?!”

He nods, the words reaching him through a long tunnel, staggering over to the dragon’s fallen form, wishing as hard as he ever has in his life for the warm comfort of Sarah, then immediately repulsed by the thought, disgusted with himself for what he has done - what he _did_ -

Focus.

“Zima!” he yells, his fingers hovering helplessly inches away from her. He won’t touch her, he won’t ever touch her again, oh gods, what has he done -

Zima stirs slowly and he backs away, the sounds of the battle faded, nearly stumbling over the odd stone. Out of the maelstrom, one certainty emerges: this is his responsibility. He did this to them. Now he must fix it.

But to do that, he slowly realizes, he must do something unforgivable again.

“Go!” Natasha yells. She’s tying the limp figure of the soldier to the harness on Zima’s back, securing him with the odd lengths of rope Steve had kept in the saddlebags. Steve is still on the ground, the horror of what he’s done, what he has to do again threatening to engulf him. Her shout jars him back into jerky motion,  focused on what he can do to save the soldier - the prisoner. Jerkily, he pulls himself onto Zima behind the soldier, trying to ignore the reality of what he’s doing - _he’s touching someone’s daemon_ -

“What - What about the hydra?” he manages.

Natasha shakes her head. “We’ll deal with it, Steve. You need to save him.”

He knows. He _knows._

And yet -

 _Sarah_ , Steve thinks helplessly, and knows what he has to do. He leans forward and places his gloved hand on her neck, hating himself, hating what he’s doing.

“Please.”

They race back home. Zima is keening in pain, still woozy from her being knocked out. Steve holds on to her with one gloved hand, channelling his strength into her. The other holds onto the soldier, slumped forward in unconsciousness, bleeding out from the wound in his side.

Sarah is waiting for them when they arrive. Rain is still pelting down in an endless torrent, lightning flashing across the sky. They land, and Steve starts to dismount, but stumbles, the swampy air filling his lungs again as he loses contact with Zima. He can’t breathe. He drops to the ground, gasping for air. Behind him, Zima is a dark silhouette, the soldier still tied to her back. They are running out of time.

“Sarah,” he manages. “Go.”

It takes a split second for her to understand, but then she’s off, sprinting away towards Helen’s cottage. He watches her go, trying to slow down the oncoming terror. It’s still a vicious, tearing thing, but he finds that he can put it aside somewhat, call up the memory of all the times she’s come back.

Behind him, a soft groan.

He stiffens, turning around slowly. Zima is awake, watching him with one luminous eye. On her back, the figure is stirring.

Steve pulls himself to his feet, using her harness as handholds. He’s still weak, lacking the hollow power being in the air brings. His heart beats its familiar irregular rhythm. His lungs struggle with the swampy air. But he’s going to do this. He’s going to save this stranger and repay the debt he owes, make up for some fraction of the horror this prisoner must have experienced.

He checks the ropes first. He needn’t have. Natasha is never less than scarily efficient. Then he moves on to the masked figure itself.

“Hey,” Steve says softly, as gently as he can manage. The soldier does not deserve a single more moment of violence in his life. He is blinking his eyes in fits and starts, struggling to wake up. “Hey, you’re safe now. We got you away.”

The soldier’s eyes widen, and Steve almost doubts once again the truth of the bond between the soldier and Zima. The naked emotion, the anger and fear and confusion in the soldier’s eyes goes beyond whatever the stories Steve’s heard tell him the severed are capable of. But the answer slides into place as neatly as an arrow finding its target.

The soldier has been separated too.

Steve doesn’t know if it’s a product of the very magic that enslaved him, or something that the soldier was capable of beforehand, if he was someone who took the same decision Steve did before the vultures snapped him up and swallowed him whole. But in the colossal mess that Steve has found himself in, it’s one small relief. He is not irreversibly torn apart, shattered; the bond between the two of them can be repaired.

The soldier’s breathing speeds up, and he starts struggling against the ropes he’s tied down with, trying to wrench himself free, and Steve steps forward slightly, holding his hands out in a calming gesture, but the soldier’s desperation increases instead, and Steve sees the red patch worn through the thick layers of bandages grow visibly as the wound in his side reopens.

“Stop!” Steve yells. “You’re hurting yourself!” The soldier only struggles harder and Zima lets out a harsh clicking sound deep in her throat, shifting restlessly. Steve can see more fresh blood welling from the cut in the soldier’s side, dripping to edge of the white gauze, and that’s it. He rushes in, presses his palms to both sides of the soldier’s face. “Stop. Please.”

The soldier has gone deathly still. For the span of a breath, they stare at each other. Steve can hear a faint rattling sound, which he slowly realizes is the soldier breathing, stifled by the mask.

"Let me take this off, huh,” Steve says softly. He hooks his fingers along the edge and slowly pulls the mask - muzzle - away. There is no movement from the soldier as he does so, just a frozen stillness, grey-blue eyes boring into his.

He does not notice the soldier working his left hand, with its shine of metal, out of the bindings, it's unnatural strength making quick work of the ropes.

The punch comes out of nowhere. Steve reels back, head spinning, mask in his hands, and falls to his hands and knees. Out of the corner of his eyes he can see the silhouette of the soldier turning away to free his other hand.

Stand up.

Steve staggers to his feet.

For the first time, he sees the soldier's face fully.

Bucky.

The name hangs in his mind, and Steve knows him. His head is echoing, ringing. He knows this person, this soldier - Bucky? - somewhere deep in his bones, in the beat of his heart. The facts of his existence are carved into his bones.

And then: three figures, through the dark. Sarah, Helen Cho, and Wanda. Wanda pulls Steve away from the soldier - Bucky? - with surprising strength. Bucky is still snarling, straining against the ropes while Zima curls up in distress underneath him. He is looking right at Steve, baring his teeth in hatred.

Wanda disappears from Steve’s side and Sarah takes her place. Steve hands take a death grip in her fur as Wanda ghosts pasts him and towards Bucky.

“Helen,” Wanda says, her voice echoing lowly.

“Ready when you are.”

Faster than the eye can see, Wanda grabs hold of the soldier, immobilizing him. Helen darts in, pulling out a vial of potion from her smock and holds it to his lips.

Steve starts forward, but Sarah grabs onto his sleeve with her teeth, not letting him move. “It’s just something to put him to sleep,” she says when she has his attention. “So they can move him to the infirmary and stitch up his side without him hurting himself.”

Steve understands, but it doesn’t make it any easier to watch. He can see it all, in terrible detail. The soldier tries to turn his head away, but Wanda is there, grimly, impossibly holding him in place, trying to calm him down, explaining what they’re doing. When he doesn’t even seem to register her presence, she brings her scarf to his nose. Eventually he has no choice but to open his mouth to breathe, almost choking with fear, and Helen immediately pours the vial in. He manages to spit a little out, but has no choice but to swallow most of it. Steve can see it gradually taking effect, despite his continuing struggles, the venom in his eyes, slowing down his movements and unfocusing his gaze.

Within a minute, the soldier’s eyes have drifted shut. Zima lets out a long, low sound and her head droops, nearly touching the ground. Sarah rushes forward to help her, gently lowering the dragon’s head down and murmuring nonsense at her until Zima is out cold along with her human.

Steve watches numbly as Helen’s crane daemon checks over Zima, making soft hooting sounds as he does. He mind is on a loop - the soldier's eyes, the look on his face.

It feels like something has cracked inside him, and the world has turned inside out. Bucky. A smile. A laugh. Until the end of the line. Memory, upon memory, just out of reach, just over the horizon. And then, from the swirling chaos-

Another name.

Steve stands stock-still, hardly daring to breathe.

Helen is looking over the soldier, checking his pulse. “We need to work quickly.” She’s already redressed the wound, a fresh bandage wrapped around his torso much more expertly than Natasha’s rushed job. “It’s a miracle he was still conscious.”

Wanda nods, and somehow manages to undo Natasha’s expert knots in a manner of seconds. She slings the unconscious figure over her soldier in a fireman’s carry and ghosts away. Helen lingers for a moment. She addresses Steve. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” he manages. “Go ahead, I’ll catch up.”

Helen returns a brisk nod and starts off down the hill, crane daemon perched on her shoulder. Steve can’t match her pace. He doesn’t even try.

He has it, he thinks. He has it.  A truth he once knew.

He stands there for a long time, half holding on to the tenuous thread he’s caught hold of, half waiting for any glimpse of the rest of the returning riders, half steeling himself to turn towards the infirmary, face the consequences of his actions.

 

 

A long while later, quieter than a whisper, Wanda has glided up to stand beside him, her breathing even despite the tremendous amount of strength it must have taken to carry Bucky, to return all the way here.

“He’ll be okay,” Wanda says. “Helen’s still working on him.” She looks tired. There are dark circles beneath her eyes.

“Are you alright?”

“Yes,” she says. Again, her eyes seem to flash red for a split second. “The battle goes roughly, but it seems that we will win. She steps forward, cupping his cheek. “Take some rest,” she says. “You have done your part.”

Steve nods. He watches her go, take the long climb towards the Elder’s - Peggy’s - cave.

He doesn’t listen to Wanda's advice. He stays up the whole night on the cliffs beside the sleeping Zima, the wind howling around him, waiting for the others to return. He wants to go back, join the battle against the many-headed dragon that the others must be waging, but he has no way to reach them. He is crippled once again, as effectively as his lungs, his heart have done to him so many times before, without a mount of his own to fight.

It hits him again, the inescapable knowledge that Zima was not a dragon, Zima was a daemon, and he touched her, he put his hands to her scales like she was any other common animal, and let Sarah convince him that she was friendly, that this was something he could do and not the most terrible violation of a human being’s dignity and privacy imaginable. He shudders, retching at the thought of a stranger touching Sarah, running their hands through her fur. It would be as if someone had gouged out one his eyes and let him see with the other as they caressed it, played with it, taunted him. It would be as if a stranger had forced themself onto him, covering his mouth and holding him down as he desperately, fruitlessly tried to escape. There was no greater violation imaginable.

Sarah sidles up to him. “She chose you, Steve. She was the one who picked you up and flew away.”

“Still- “

“Steve, “she says. “We are not dumb animals. A daemon away from its human is still a soul, can still make its own decisions”

He tries to understand what she’s saying. It’s too strange. “It was unforgivable.”

She sighs, but there’s an undertone of fondness to it. “Always so stubborn. Talk to them after they’ve recovered, if it makes you feel better. You’ll see. Let it be until then. There’s no use in punishing yourself until you know that you’ve committed a crime.”

He hums, trying to accept her perspective, and runs a hand through her fur. She lets him, which is a miracle in and of itself. “Thank you."

 

 

As the night wears on, his mind keeps on returning to that wonderful, terrible moment, the instant while he was standing in the pelting rain with Zima and Bucky and the world cracked open and something from before fell through, something that was his, and his alone. He’s almost sure of it now. It’s no longer a fragment, a tenuous wisp of imagination.

He looks at it head on. No turning back now.

“Aletheia,” Steve says.

Beside him, Sarah stiffens.

“Aletheia,” he says again, turning, kneeling to look her in the eye. “I remember now.”

She’s trembling, his daemon, his soul, barely able to contain herself, to believe the truth in what he's saying, what he's admitting to. He’s seeing her for the first time - the beach, the tiny wren perched on his fingers in his first memories, and the day she settled, the day he left, all at once, crowding his mind and then slipping away like sand in the wind.

But he remembers her now. The bare bones of her, of himself. The truth, hidden far away.

“Aletheia,” he says. “Oh gods, Aletheia,” and he scoops her up into his arms, his daemon, and she’s whining and licking his face all over, and he’s crying into her fur, and they’re finally whole again, finally found the missing part of themselves gaping so wide they might as well have been half a person. It should be a small solace in the face of the uncertain fate of the others, the horrors that Bucky has obviously endured – but there it is, undeniably true, incredibly precious. His knuckles are white as he clutches at her; he can feel her trembling.

They stay like that for a long time.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'О Боже мой' = 'My God!'  
> Natasha's daemon's name is Vasilii, taken from a Russian folktale in which a young boy is taken away from his parents and then faces several trials.  
> 'Lekeplassen' = the Norwegian word for 'Playground'. This is a nod to Agents of Shield, where the underground base from which the characters operate for most of the series has the same name.  
> 'Aletheia' is Greek for 'truth'


	4. daybreak

The others return in the morning.

Steve has been curled around his daemon for hours as the wind batters them on the cliff’s edge, her wolf-eyes catching sight of the far off specks minutes before he sees them. They jump up, synchronised, in tune with each other in a way that Steve has only vaguely been with Zima until now, and trace the path of the others through the sky, the even-further off dots that mark the return of the boats.

Steve had never doubted that they would win. All the while, during the desperate flight back and then the long wait, he could still feel the hydra’s call, growing even more frantic and faint as the villagers battered it down. He had believed, had known a long time ago that humans and dragons working together could accomplish anything, and he thinks he’ll be able to eventually come to terms with the fact that he was not a part of this victory. Today it still stings, but there are so many other things to wonder about that the tinge of jealousy gets lost in the whirlwind of the others' joyous whoops, the pulse and pull of pressure in the air as wings settle down around him and his friends touch land once again.

Sam is hurried away by the medics; Steve only catches a glimpse of him, but he’s grinning ear to ear through the pain, his armor shredded across his back. Sharon pecks him on the cheek. Rhodey nods gravely at Steve then turns back towards the ocean, waiting for Tony to arrive on the boats. And from the village itself, crowds are rushing up to them, shouts of concern, of joy echoing against the mountains, and Steve lets the wave of them swallow him whole, lets the crowd carry him froward in their wake to the great hall where there is a feast fit for kings prepared for the victors.

The hydra is dead. The hydra is dead and the war is over, and there is peace in the land once more, and what do such trivial things as the odd burnt boat or broken bone mean in the momentousness of this occasion, the change it is sure to bring?

In the midst of the celebrations, the drinking and merriment, the hollers and medical treatment as the boats arrive, Steve catches sight of Natasha in her own corner, watching the proceedings with a slight smile of her own, shadowed by things that he’s sure are darker than he’s ever seen. He goes up to her.

“Were there any others? Like him?”

“No,” she says quietly, her hands running over the fine grain of the wooden table. “No, I think he was the only one.”

 

 

Memories are slowly trickling through, one by one. Sometimes, Steve doesn’t even realize it, he just looks at something, and his entire context for it has changed. It’s so strange - the forge is both Tony’s and Howard’s - a man who he still has only the vaguest idea of. The dragon training arena is both brand new and years old. The things that are coming back are coming back so slowly it’s like an island emerging from the mist. You see the barest hints at first, and it keeps on shifting, changing. And inside, the heartland yet to be revealed.

He runs a finger over a rivet that he had helped weld in the dragon enclosure with wonder. It’s rusted over. The strangest things surface from the chaos in his mind. Steve has the feeling that if he could just sit still, it would all come back to him. But he can’t, there’s too much to do; and so he’s left with this: tantalizing glimpses of the person he used to be, offered seemingly without rhyme or reason.

Zima gives a faint croon from behind them on the cliff, and Steve whips around. The dragon is opening her eyes, looking faintly confused. Bucky. He must be waking up. Steve nearly sets of down the hill that very moment, but is stopped by a warning thought from Sar- Aletheia.

“They’ve been apart long enough,” she murmurs.

Steve agrees.

Leading a groggy daemon/dragon towards the infirmary in full view of the entire village hours after he helped end the dragon war isn’t the weirdest thing Steve’s been a part of in the last few days, but it’s definitely up there. Zima keeps on wanting to go back to sleep. It's no small task to keep her walking.

It takes a while. She's eventually maneuvered into the enclosure for the larger daemons of people in the sick bay, most of who keep well away from her. She seems quite content with this, curling up in one corner and going to sleep again after she’s settled.

Steve steels himself, and her and Aletheia both stride up to the infirmary door and knock.

A harried Helen Cho cracks it open, her crane daemon fluttering behind her shoulder in annoyance once he sees the two of them. Helen herself isn’t much happier. “What is it now, for gods’ sakes? Another boatload of wounded?”

Steve feels that old familiar nervousness but stands his ground. “Did the soldier wake up?”

“아, 좆같네. Yes,” she says tiredly, swinging the door fully open. “You might as well come in. You just missed it. That boy is like a machine. He didn’t even seem to know that he was hurt; he just got up from the bed and started walking towards the door. We had to dose him again to stop him from hurting himself or anyone else.”

“Is he alright now?” Steve asks as he steps inside, holding the door for Aletheia.

“Yes, yes, he’s just sleeping it off.”

There is a faint smell of blood, but it’s mostly overpowered by the scent of sage and rosemary, herbs that Helen lines the windows with. Half of the beds are occupied. A few villagers have some nasty burns and shallow scrapes from their encounter with the hydra. Sam Wilson is there too, lying on his stomach. Steve stops at his side.

“Hey, man,” Sam says. He grins up at Steve. Sar- Aletheia pads up to Redwing, who gives an excited chirp and flutters from Sam’s bedside onto her back.

“Hey,” Steve replies. There is a faint mottled burn pattern on Sam’s back. It stretches from shoulder to shoulder, almost like a folded pair of wings. The burns themselves are not too serious - probably a bad first degree at the worst, but it must itch like hell on top of the pain. “What happened?”

“Fucking hydra, that’s what. It got pissed when I burnt off one of its heads, nearly knocked me into the volcano. Luckily, my armor took the worst of the heat, so I didn’t get off too bad, all things considered.”

Steve huffs out a laugh. “No shit. You only took out a third of the cavalry, as far as I can tell, and that was before you went at the fuck-off huge dragon and defeated two-ninths of it by yourself.”

“Way to make me feel loved, Steve.”

Steve hums, and reaches over, settling the ice packs more securely on Sam’s back. “You should be proud, Sam.” He pauses for a second. “I know Riley would be.”

The laughter on Sam’s face turns more solemn. He nods and clasps Steve’s hand. A current of understanding passes between them. “Yeah,” Sam says, finally. “Yeah, I think so too.”

Steve stays at Sam’s side for a few more minutes, both of them enjoying the silent companionship that the other offers, before Helen comes bustling over to apply more salve to Sam’s burns. Steve offers to help, but she waves him off, saying that two people would only make things harder. Steve nods, and steps away.

The burns will probably fade, but for a few weeks, Sam Wilson will have wings.

Steve heads deeper into the infirmary.

Bucky is there, still asleep. His breaths are even, measured. Steve checks the wound in his side. The bandages are new, and there’s no sign of blood. There’s no fever or swelling either, and he breathes a sigh of relief. He looks at the notes that Helen scribbled out on the parchment pinned to the head of the bed. He’ll be out for at least another few hours.

Steve can wait.

He plays a couple of games of cards with Sam and helps out Helen where he can. His bedside manner is, as usual, awful, but that’s nothing he didn’t know after his first brief stint as her assistant in the months immediately after he woke up. She had laid him off eventually, as gently as she could, but by then they both knew that it wasn’t what he was cut out for. At least he can administer potions and change dressings when the need arises, something that had come in extremely useful with Zima.

After a couple of hours, Helen bustles over, a cup of broth in her hand. “He’s going to wake up soon. If he’s not violent, try to get this in him, hm?”

Steve takes the mug from her hands. “What is it?”

“Another one of Wanda's mixes. He needs to heal.”

“What if he reacts badly again?”

She gives him a look. “My hands are full, Steve. The rest of the village is focused on rebuilding and I’ve got ten new patients. There’s more sleeping potion in the back and you know how to brew it. You’re responsible for this one.”

Steve nods in acquiescence and settles down beside Bucky. He takes the unconscious man’s wrist in his hand, timing his pulse against his own. It's slow and even, perhaps slightly faster than it should be to compensate for the blood loss.  But within a few minute, Steve can feel it gradually speeding up as he works his way towards consciousness.

Bucky’s eyes blink open.

He looks at Steve for a few seconds, face expressionless. Then he turns away, going back to staring at the ceiling.

That’s pretty much how it goes.

Steve manages to get him to drink the broth, but Bucky is, for the most part, unresponsive. He’ll eat, slowly, mechanically, when food is given to him, and once the wound in his side has healed somewhat, he’s perfectly able to move on his own; he just - doesn’t. He’ll spend hours lying on his bed, staring at the cracks on the infirmary ceiling. He rarely sleeps. Once or twice a day, at completely random times, he’ll stand up and head towards the door, but it’s like he’s sleepwalking. He doesn’t even go towards Zima; he just walks straight out. There’s nothing behind it.

Steve tries to help. It pulls something in him, looking at Bucky. On the surface, there’s nothing, and Steve honestly doesn’t know if he’s projecting or imagining things, but he can tell, somehow. He knows Bucky. There’s a thread between them, however tenuous or ancient or unremembered, and through it it’s like looking at someone buried beneath a mountain; there’s not even the strength left to cry out for help.

He visits as often as he can, when there’s time spared from the reconstruction efforts, from repairing the ships and counting the livestock. He tells him about his day, about Aletheia, about how Zima is just outside, how if everyone is quiet they can hear her breathing, a steady, deep rumble low in her throat, reverberating through the walls.

He doesn’t know if it makes a difference. Hell, eerily like with Aletheia, he doesn’t actually know Zima’s real name.

Bucky spends two weeks in the infirmary, slightly longer than he should have, but he disrupts their estimates by apparently having no indications of feeling pain - as evidenced by his day-after-stabbing escape attempt - and so moving about too soon for the gash to heal properly. His left arm has threads of silver steel winding around it it, forming a branching pattern on his forearm that reaches down in straight lines to his knuckles. The strange armor had refused to be pried off when Helen and Wanda tried.  

 

 

When Bucky has healed enough, Steve offers to take him in.

Helen is standing at his bedside, looking skeptical. “Are you sure he’s ready?”

“Yes,” Steve says. He has to help somehow. His memories are still coming back in a slow, agonizing trickle. Sometimes he’s not even sure if they’re real or something he dreamed up. It's something like looking at a woven tapestry so big that at first you can only take in the details; a thread here, a strand there. He’s a long way away from remembering everything. And he has a feeling that Bucky is much more than a strand; he is a thousand, a million threads at the very center of this tapestry, and he’s only grasping the edges of what he means, what everything means. But he’ll get there.

Soon.

He knows it.

Bucky is sitting slumped on the bed, where Steve had to steer him back to after one of his wandering attempts. He isn’t looking at either of them, just staring numbly at his hands.

Helen still looks unsure, but she and Steve both know that the infirmary is not going to be the best place for Bucky to get better. He needs to be somewhere with Zima, not cooped up inside with her permanently feet away. Steve’s house - at least the hall - is big enough for her. He can set up a cot beside the hearth. He’ll argue with Fury about it later.

Helen moves into Bucky’s line of sight. “If it’s alright with you,” she tries.

No response.

After a minute, she shrugs helplessly and turns back to him. “If he goes with you, I’ll allow it. You can’t go dragging him around behind you because you feel guilty.”

“This isn’t that.”.

Helen looks at him steadily for a moment before turning away. He lets out a breath.

Bucky hasn’t moved.

Steve takes a step forward so he’s standing where Helen was a minute ago. He kneels down so he can meet Bucky’s gaze, as best as he can. Aletheia is a little behind him, keeping her distance.

“C’mon, Buck,” he whispers.

A memory from the mist, in pieces: Grey-blue eyes. A hand on his shoulder.  A smile, blinding white, and laughter shaking through the both of them. C’mon, Steve.

No response. The soldier’s eyes are blank, empty.

There’s something high and tight at the back of Steve’s throat. His fingers clench in his tunic.

He hears movement.

There’s a little ping of surprise from Aletheia. He opens his eyes, and -

Bucky stands up.

Steve wants to jump for joy, wants to hug him, wants to beg him to come back. Bucky’s eyes are still dead, not meeting his gaze, but there must be something left inside him, an ember, a spark, and Steve intends to do whatever he can to bring him - them - back.

“How ‘bout you follow me, huh?” he starts off by saying. He starts walking, and presses his lips together to keep himself from smiling when he hears the soft clump of boots behind. Aletheia brings up the rear guard, ready to tell him if anything goes wrong.

As they exit the infirmary, Bucky starts walking off to one side, slightly behind Steve.They make their way out of the infirmary and the roped off area set up along the building where Zima is.

She’s awake. She’s watching them, her scales rippling like liquid obsidian in the sunlight as she tilts her neck to keep them in her sight. Aletheia trots over to her and Steve feels the gist of what she says to the other daemon.  Zima snorts, but agrees, making her way out behind her, shaking her wings to ease the stiffness from them.

Steve sneaks a glance at Bucky. His expression hasn’t changed, except for maybe a slight tightening around the eyes.

If it was Aletheia - hell, even if it was Sarah, or his wolf-soul in those blank days before she had any name that he could remember at all - he would be rushing towards her, burying his face in the fur at her neck, clinging to her so hard the very universe couldn’t tear them apart.

He can’t begin to imagine what happened to Bucky.

Aletheia and Zima walk up to them. Steve places his hand in Aletheia’s fur and they move to the side, letting Bucky and Zima face each other.

Bucky is staring at the ground. It’s almost as if he’s refusing to acknowledge the dragon in front of him on purpose. After a moment, he turns to the side, away from both Steve and Zima. It’s probably the clearest his non-expressions have ever been.

Steve’s heart drops to his stomach. He spares a glance for Zima - her expression is the same unreadable blank as Bucky’s - before going towards Buck. Aletheia will handle the dragon.

“Bucky,” he says lowly. “That’s your daemon.”

Bucky doesn’t move. Then he deliberately starts walking away, down the hill, in the exact opposite direction as Zima.

Steve doesn’t understand.

He and Aletheia share a helpless glance before he starts jogging after Bucky while she goes off to deal with Zima. He reaches Bucky, breaths wheezing in his lungs, and jerks to a stop in front of him. Bucky reflexively stops in his tracks, gaze still boring into the ground. Behind him, Steve can see Aletheia leading a reluctant Zima towards them.

“Bucky,” he says again. He doesn’t know what to do. Forcefully drag Bucky towards his owndaemmon? Put him through another torment, even if it’s for his own good? “Please,” is all that comes out of his mouth.

Zima has closed the distance between them now and Steve sees Bucky tense as he hears her heavy footfalls coming closer on the soft grass. Without thinking, he steps forward and catches hold of Bucky’s armored arm. Bucky jerks, before stilling completely.

Slowly, not tightening his hold to force him but not letting him go either, Steve pulls at him until he turns around. The armor ripples as he does. And then Bucky is facing Zima again, and Zima’s face is expressionless, even more so than her limited facial movements allow for but she’s staring at Bucky intently, almost belligerently.

Bucky shies away from her. Steve wonders, maybe for the first time, why he hasn’t ever heard Zima speak.

Bucky hasn’t spoken either.

He pushes the thought away. He goes over to Zima, slipping on his gauntlets from where they’re tucked into his belt after a rough mental nudge from Sar-Aletheia. He won’t use his bare hands, however much she says that Zima doesn’t mind. It would be unbearably cruel.

“Hey,” he says. No more forcing either of them to do anything they don’t’ want to. “It’s okay.” What else can he say? ‘You’re free now’? A daemon is always bound to its human, so that would be a lie. “You’re safe.”

Aletheia pads up to him and gently fits her teeth over his fingers. He gets the message. Hesitantly, not daring to look at Bucky, he places his hand on Zima's rough scales.

It’s like a jolt of electricity, like a static shock from a lightening-charged rod. Behind him, Steve hears a sharp breath.

“I’m sorry,” he says to Zima, to both of them. 

It's not enough. It never will be.

Zima stares at him for a long moment. Then she deliberately backs away and raises her wings, taking off, making him brace against the downwind, heading in the direction of the recess he found her in. Steve turns back around after watching her go, an ache in his chest.

Bucky is looking at the ground again.

 

 

Technically, Steve lives in chief Fury’s house.

Technically.

Fury’s never in, is the thing. The chief seems to live mostly in his own office, usually making a pass once through the echoing, dusty house once every few days. It’s Steve’s job to keep his own room and the kitchen clean. The hall is where he planned to have Bucky sleep. It’s large enough for Zima to curl up on one side with room to spare. But evidently, that won’t be happening. So there’s enough time to have an argument about Bucky’s living arrangements later without adding a dragon into the mix.

Steve leads Bucky to the hall, tells him to sit on the low armchair by the fire. Then he rushes upstairs, getting a roll of bedding and a pillow.

“You’ll sleep here, okay,” he says, holding them out to Bucky once he’s back downstairs. Bucky slowly tears his gaze away from the fire and turns his dead eyes on the pillow. He makes no move to take it.

After a moment, Steve starts to lay them out a safe distance beside the fire. Talking about Zima seems to stress Bucky out, so he chooses another topic. “I’ll need to go to the workshop tomorrow, so I guess if you want you can hang around here.”

Again, no response. Steve pushes down the irrational anger that threatens to raise its head.

It’s getting late. Steve puts together some stew and ladles it out into two bowls, handing one to Bucky, who hadn’t moved an inch the whole time he had been cooking, just stared at him like he was trying to figure something out.

Steve starts in on his own dinner, watching out of the corner of his eye as Bucky eats slowly. Once they’re both done he takes the bowl from him and washes up, then banks the embers of the fire.

“I’m going to sleep now, okay?” he tries.

No reply.

Steve heads upstairs. An hour later, Aletheia slips into the room under cover of the darkness, curling up with her head on his stomach.

He strokes her fur. “How’s Zima?”

“Coming around. She’s agreed to stay closer, near the enclosure with the dragons for now.”

Steve sighs. “I want to help them.”

“Forcing them together right now will only make things worse.”

“I know,” he says, but it weighs on him, thinking of Bucky sleeping all by himself, without the warmth of a daemon to comfort him. Rolling off the bed, dragging off Aletheia who lets out a startled yelp, he grabs his pillow and a blanket. “I’m sleeping downstairs.”

She gives the mental equivalent of an exasperated shake of her head, but comes with him, her claws clacking on the wooden steps.

Bucky is still sitting by the fire, but has moved to the bedding Steve had laid out. He turns towards the sound of them coming down the stairs. Steve swears that he can see his eyes widen.

Steve lays his stuff down on the opposite side of the hearth. “I’ll stay here, if that’s alright with you. Just, you know, make a sign or something if that's not okay and I’ll go right back upstairs.”.  

Bucky’s eyes jump up from the general area of his chest to his chin for a moment, and then Bucky deliberately lies down, pulling the blanket over himself. Steve holds back a smile and lies down too, Aletheia beside him, a warm weight at his back.

It’s the best sleep he’s had in ages.

 

 

These days, Steve always wakes up remembering more about his life before. By now he’s pieced a few things together: He probably lived on Skjoldr, at least in the beginning. He had supposed that must have gone missing when he was very young for no one to remember him, except now when he wakes up he has new memories of being on the island for his tenth birthday, which has thrown everything off all over again. Bucky was there too, or a boy he thinks is Bucky, grinning and still slightly gap toothed as he smushed cake into Steve’s face before Steve tackled him onto the ground, laughing, squirming as cake was stuffed down his shirt.  Aletheia was a sparrow, chittering in excitement. A small daemon that must have been Zima tried to leap up to her from the ground, shifting smoothly in mid-air from a red panda to a robin.

It’s a gift, to be able to remember this, Steve thinks. He warms his hands by the fire as the sun breaks over the horizon, watching the slow rise and fall of Bucky’s back as he sleeps. But it raises far more questions than it answers.

For one: If he was on Skjoldr at age ten, he’s what, twenty now?

That’s ten years ago. Fury was here then. Hell, everyone he knows has been on the island for more than ten years – even Natasha – save for the ambassadors. It doesn’t add up. So it must not have been Skjoldr. But he remembered the dragon enclosure near the village – he remembered helping build it. Or was it repair it?

Nothing makes sense.

One thing he does know: He was stronger, healthier before. No weak lungs or brittle bones holding him back. Tackling Bucky down to the ground right now would be impossible if he wasn’t riding the high being in the air gave him. So the accident, whatever it was, apparently also affected his lungs and heart along with his brain.

Great.

Steve presses his hands to his eyes.

There’s a soft shuffling beside him. He turns his head to see Bucky waking up, blinking sleepily in the shadows of the fire.

“Morning,” Steve whispers, then immediately feels stupid for doing so. But Bucky looks at him, right at him, for a split second after he says it, and his eyes aren’t dead anymore.

 

***

The soldier thinks that maybe it has ended. There’s no more red, where he is right now, and for so long everything had been red, and before that the black of the inside of a dragon egg before it hatches, and he remembers carving on the inside of the shell, though he doesn't remember why anymore. Maybe he was trying to break out.

That is new too. The memories.

Before, in the red, he was a water-grey flowing in the current. But now he has taken root, and instead of rushing forward with time, it is rushing past him, and he has to live in every moment, stretching forwards and backwards into the past and future, a continuous thread instead of a disconnected strand. It's very tiresome. He gets the feeling that he’s mostly forgetting that he has to stay present, but he can’t really tell.

 _He_ is here, though. Steve. The soldier remembers Steve. He hates him for what he did to them.

No.

The opposite of that. Whatever that is.

Steve knows what to do, he has a moral compass straighter than anyone he’s ever known, so when in doubt, stick with him, follow him, even when he has one of his batshit crazy ideas, even when it kills him, even when it pulls her away from him, his dear soul, and then –

He thinks vaguely, later, that he should be happy that it’s over.

But that’s an old sentiment. It hangs in his mind without meaning.

***

 

A few days later, Steve’s coming back from the workshop to bring Bucky over to the hall for lunch, and - he isn’t there. Not anywhere in the house. Not curled up beneath one of the trees at the edge of the woods. Not sleeping in the tall grass in the clearing to the west.

Steve starts panicking. He can’t have lost him now, he can’t do this again, he just got him back.

“Aletheia-” he starts to say, but she cuts him off.

“I’ve got it.”

She puts her nose to the ground and leads him forward, zigzagging completely randomly away from the house. Thankfully, it's downwards, towards the village, not into the woods. She leads him towards the cove, and Steve sees him.

Bucky is standing by the cliffs that tower up from the beach, holding a sharp stone in his hands, carving into the sheer walls. Steve slows down, not wanting to disturb him and instead circles round, trying to see what he’s working on. It's too faint right now to make out. Those marks in the cave must have taken – years.

Gods.

Without prompting, Bucky gently puts the stone in his hand down and turns, picking his way towards Steve. Steve is sure that they hadn't made a sound, but he feels Aletheia nudge him and looks up to see Zima peering over at him from one of the platforms leading down to the docks.

Right. Okay, so they’re definitely still sharing some spatial awareness - another sign that they’ve not been severed.

It only takes a few minutes for Bucky to reach his side, the waves crashing onto the rocky shore behind him. Questions are clogging up Steve’s throat. He doesn’t want to force anything, doesn't want to push -

  – but he _wants_.  
  
Bucky, as usual, is silent. Steve leads him up to the village, keeping an eye out for Zima but she’s disappeared again. They eat together in silence, Steve too worried to concentrate on his food, thinking about what he could do to help, what he should have done before –

There’s more fish on his plate than there was a minute ago. He’s sure of it.

He turns to ask Aletheia, but she just opens her mouth in a wolf-smile, laughing at him. Suspiciously, he looks at Bucky’s plate.

Half of the fish has gone. A minute ago it was almost full.

Steve has to hold back a smile of his own. He gets up to get more food, both for himself and Bucky. The whole afternoon in the workshop, he stays buoyed by the memory of what might have been a smile under the curtain of dark hair as Bucky ducked his head to eat.

After work, curiosity gets the better of him. The beach is empty. He walks up to the rocks again, but there’s no trace of the carvings, just a series of long, deep scratches that might have been made by a dragon.

 

 

That night, Steve dreams.

He is young, younger than he has clear memories of being. Fourteen - fifteen? Sixteen at the very oldest. Aletheia flits around him, enjoying the sea breeze. She’s very close to deciding now, sticking to a few favourite forms as she shifts with liquid grace. A stray cat. A northern harrier. A grey wolf. He doesn’t want her to stop changing, a desperate feeling that vaguely surprises his dream self.

He’s sitting on the cliffs of Skjoldr, staring out towards the sea. Behind him, a shadow detaches from the village and heads towards him. It’s a girl about his age. Her eyes are piercing, her brown hair pulled back in a braid. Her daemon has not settled yet either, and flows down to the ground towards Aletheia as she sits beside Steve.

“Zvezda misses you,” she says.

Steve grins ruefully. “The chiefs are keeping me in lockdown. Are you sure we can’t tell them?”

She shakes her head decisively. “We can’t. It's better to do the whole thing ourselves, or we’ll be thrown into a bunch of tribunals. But it's difficult when we’re on a timeline.”

Steve nods. They’re too old, is the problem, despite being so young. Last month, they lost Dum Dum, whose daemon settled as a bear, grounding him forever. And if Aletheia settles as something too big for Zvezda to carry, well -

He forces his thoughts away. “We have enough time,” he says.

She slips her hand over his. He holds still for a second before turning his palm over and intertwining is fingers with hers.

“And if we don’t?”

He looks at Aletheia, his dear daemon, his soul. But he is one person, and what is one person against the weight of a thousand?

“Then I’ll cross the wasteland.”

He looks at her, and her gaze is hard and blazing. ‘We do what we have to,” she says, and he knows she understands.

He loves her. Or he thinks he does. How would he know? But her daemon is intertwined with his, and they hold hands and watch the sunset, and Steve thinks that he’s never been happier, not once in his life.

“Peggy,” Steve tells her, after. “When all this is over, I’d love to take you dancing.”

She smiles.

 

 

Steve wakes up.

There are tears in his eyes, and he dashes them away angrily. Well. He wanted his memories back. And now he’s got them, and it’s nothing but another life to mourn, another love he’ll never get back, another set of people he might never find again -

Wait.

_Peggy._

“Hey, man,” Sam greets him slightly groggily ten minutes later as he pounds on the library door. The damn key has gone missing again.

“Sam,” Steve gasps, gripping Aletheia’s fur. “I’m really sorry about this. But I need to see the birth records from ninety years ago.”

A few extremely dusty minutes later Steve pores over the census records, Sam having long since gone back upstairs muttering about weirdo dragon-riders. There - Peggy Carter, with the name of her daemon and her parents. He thinks maybe he was a bit older than her in the dream, so he flips a page back -

\- and is face to face with his own name.

Steven Grant Rogers and Aletheia. Born to Sarah and Joseph Rogers.

Steve leans forward in the rickety old chair and supports his forehead with his hands, never taking his name off those eleven words. His voice, when he speaks, is muffled.

“Did you know?”

Aletheia places her front paws on the table, leaning over the book, examining it herself. “When we woke up, I wanted you to remember. But you didn’t, and I could only grasp the edges. ‘Sarah’ seemed important in some way.”

Important. Yeah. That was one word for it.

His mother’s name. He had a mother. He had a father. He had parents, and he couldn’t remember a single thing about them, but he could remember every detail about the time Howard Stark roped in him to test out some weapon prototypes.

He tries to bring up a memory, some small detail about them. Maybe, if he tries hard enough, he’ll remember _something_ -

_He’s staring up at a kind face, a soft sad smile. “We always stand up, Steven. Remember that.”_

There’s nothing else. Just the sound of her voice saying that one sentence, the sense memory of a face long-blurred by time. But he finds himself crying, mourning the life that he lost, Aletheia jumping up smoothly to his lap and curling up, echoing his own misery back to him.

 

 

It takes him a long time to pull himself back together. The book in front of him, it’s proof that he had a life.

Also, apparently, he’s almost ninety years old.

And if he knew Bucky then - Bucky’s name is probably also in this book. He has honestly no idea which of them is older - in his memory of the birthday party Bucky was taller than him, but counterpoint: Steve managed to bowl him over. He guesses randomly and flips back another page and starts scanning down the list of names.

Aletheia must spot it before him, because for some unholy reason she slams her paw down on the page and drags it down, right through the column for the daemon names. He stands up, snatching the book away from her, slamming it shut.

“What the fuck, Thea!”

“Steve, wait -”

He backs away around the table, holding the book out of her reach, opening it to the same page it was before. The list of daemon names is completely ruined, half the paper torn away in a narrow strip. He thinks, slightly hysterically, that he can still see little pieces on Aletheia’s claws.

He scans down the page anyway. There’s no ‘Bucky’. So why -?

Wait.

There’s a James Buchanan Barnes. Buchanan.

Bucky. A nickname. Of course.

And now they’ll never know Zima’s real name.

Steve puts the book down on a high shelf, turning around, staring accusatorily at Aletheia. The wolf, unmoved, sighs and cocks her head. “It doesn’t matter,” she says levelly. “You named her when she had no name.”

Steve can’t believe her. “But she already had a name! She already _had_ a name, for gods’ sakes!”

Aletheia doesn’t budge. “She’s not who she was before.”

“And what about you? What about us?! We get our name back, but they don’t?”

“Nothing happened to us, Steve. We were injured. We woke up. They’ve been prisoners for decades.”

“That doesn’t mean anythi-”

“You know it does.”

Steve glares at her mutinously for a full minute, but he knows what she means. He puts his head in his hands. “It’s a daemon thing, isn’t it?”

Gently, Aletheia clack her way over to him on the old floorboards and puts her head against his leg. “Yes.”

Steve thinks of the room carved out of rock they found in the dragon nest. The carvings. The wolf. The dragon, with its name scratched out viciously, violently.

Bucky’s already been robbed of so much. He shouldn’t have to lose this too.

Maybe he’ll remember one day, though. Maybe it's not lost forever.

Maybe he’ll remember one day and hate Steve.

Steve can’t go back home and face him. Not today. He stays in the library until dawn and then goes to work with red eyes.

 

***

The soldier knows his name now. Bucky. He’s not quite used to it yet, but he remembers that it took him a few - years, maybe? - to forget it the first time, so he’s not too worried. The only real issue he has is the amount of effort involved in staying engaged when it's so much easier, by sheer force of habit, to drift off into nothing, to be carried away unaffected through the drips and drops of the days bleeding away into the star-filled darkness. But he doesn’t like the nothingness that much anymore. When he was in the other place, it was better than being with the many writhing heads and the teeth and the killing and the blood, but here - he doesn’t want to miss anything.

It might not last, if Steve gets another stupid idea. And so he has to stay focused, soak up the blue sky and the sea and the sun and the grass. He had almost forgotten what grass felt like and spent an entire morning slowly walking back and forth barefoot in Steve’s backyard, committing the feeling to memory, barely remembering to slip back inside before Steve came back from work and panicked. He panics so much these days. He's not so even-keeled any more. Maybe that's a good thing.

Staying present for so long was hard, though, and he drifted for the rest of the evening, only really registering that Steve had come home after the other boy had fallen asleep, his face soft in the firelight. Bucky kept breathing in time with him, in and out, in and out until he fell asleep too.

One night, Steve woke up and didn’t come back. Bucky had been pretending to be asleep when he saw Steve jerk up, his hand clutching at Aletheia’s fur, and then rush out along with her. That had been bad. Bucky didn't get any more sleep that night, instead lying stock still, looking towards the door through slitted eyes, waiting for someone who didn't return.

He finds out later that Steve had gone to see Sam. And that's… good, he guesses. Nice that Steve has a friend he can talk to. But he has been observing Sam for a while.

This Sam fellow’s equally bad as Steve, he can feel it. The two of them together will result in complete and utter devastation to society as it is, and while Bucky’s quite ready for that - not that it would affect him much right now, seeing as he's barely a part of society himself - the status quo isn’t really prepared for the havoc those two will wreck together.

He had stolen Steve’s key to the library and hidden it somewhere else to prevent them from collaborating past the break point. More fool him for thinking that would work.

Today is much better. Steve came back. But he's still unhappy, that perpetual furrow between his brows. Bucky wants to smooth it out, press his claws - his _hands_ \- to his forehead and wipe it away. Maybe after he gets his own shit together.

Or maybe now.

He's well aware that he's far from being anywhere close to being normal, but Steve had shown him long ago that making a difference is up to you. So.

Time to meet her.

The dragon. 

They hadn't let him see her properly in so long - 

He doesn’t like her. She makes him feel – guilty, but it's also that she’s all wrong, and maybe if he leaves her alone for some time away from the many heads she’ll be fine again. But Bucky’s not stupid. He scares the other people milling around in this place. People instead of dragons, dragons who had no constant companions by their side, so vulnerable and breakable, and he doesn’t have one at all. But people being scared is – bad. He’s not here to hurt them. He doesn’t want them to be scared. So he’ll negotiate with the dragon. They’re both from the red, and they both scare people, so he should be able to come to some sort of truce.

He waits until Steve is asleep beside him at the hearth, because Steve worries far too much - the idiot, he thinks faintly with some fondness. It’s not like he didn’t manage fine by himself for so long when Steve was off doing who knows what after he must have broken through the ice by force of sheer stubbornness.

Bucky slips down to the dragon enclosure. She doesn’t sleep inside it, doesn’t want to be too close to others who both are and aren’t of her kind, but has made a small home in the woods surrounding it. He saw it the day she followed him to the beach. She’s waiting for him.

His throat is creaky. He hasn’t spoken for so long, he thinks that maybe he’s forgotten how to. It takes a few tries to get it right.

“Zima,” he says softly, and hates the sound of his own voice.

The dragon stares down at him inquiringly. It hurts to look at her. He – He did this to her. Trapped her.

She doesn’t like him much either. But she understands; how could she not. At the very least, Steve will like that he tried.

Rip it off like a bandage stuck to a wound, he thinks. Like that time Steve went climbing when he was seven and came back four hours later with his tunic torn to strips wrapped around his leg after his ‘adventure’ went the wrong way an hour in, Aletheia an irritated raven on his shoulder.

Like that.

Zima stands up slowly, shaking the stiffness from her leathery wings. For a wracking moment, he can feel the echo of wrongness – she should have been smaller, lighter. She would not have had scales, before.

But that was for the person he was then.

He pushes all his feelings down. Blank, like time running through your fingers, one handful at a time. Soldier: this is your mission.

He strides forward, still almost stumbling at the last instant, his hand grabbing onto a spine on her neck before he can fall.

And a jolt of something runs through him, and he feels the strangest, unfamiliar urge to cry. It - it feels like home, and it's such a foreign concept that he jolts away, gasping, curling up on the leaves strewn beside the hollow, wishing for an awful instant for the blankness and numbness of before.

He doesn’t know how long it takes him to recover. The stars are still hanging in the sky above him, and he hasn’t seen them properly for such a long time that he’s forgotten how to keep track of them, but rolling onto his back on the ground, still struggling past the tightness in his chest he imagines he can see it all again, those familiar patterns that he and Steve used to trace out when they couldn’t sleep, Aletheia and -  - curled up together off to one side.

He’ll do this.

He’ll do this, like everything else he does, for Steve.

Bucky rolls to his knees, and then clambers to his feet. Zima is – Zima is wavering around the edges, and he feels the pull from her, the way she wants to shift but can’t. He reaches out through the connection between them for the first time in so long, and he feels that longing fading, settling into something new, and the decades old charm bound to his arm that kept him untethered through time loses its hold on him as they look at one another, the metal dissolving with a flash of anbaric light, and he understands.

He is not the person he was before

***

When Steve wakes up in his nest of blankets beside the hearth, Bucky isn’t there. His neat roll is folded into a perfect square and his boots are gone.

That’s wrong. Even back before, Bucky used to wake up late. And nowadays, well. Bucky only sometimes wakes up when he hears Steve stirring. Usually he only really opens his eyes when Steve pulls the blanket off him and puts his breakfast beside him on a tray.  

But he’s not here right now.

Steve shoves the blankets off, Aletheia jumping to her feet. He forces his toes into his boots and runs, sparing a brief glance towards the kitchen, the locked front door before bursting out through the back, and -

Bucky’s there.

Bucky’s there _with Zima_.

Steve sucks in a breath, stopping short. Aletheia gives a soft huff of surprise from beside him. There they are, Bucky and Zima, standing together in the soft morning dew, Bucky barely tow feet away from her when before he never used to give her a second glance, both staring straight at him almost challengingly. Their expressions are so similar that for a split second, Steve holds back a laugh.

Steve looks at Aletheia out of the corner of his eye, but he can sense that she’s just as mystified as he is about this sudden change in the other two’s behaviour. They take a tentative step forward.

Steve examines them closely. They seem - okay. Zima is tense as she was during their inital day after he shot her down, but there's nothing visibly wrong, no sign that they're acting under someone else's control like they had been for so long.

And then he looks at Bucky again, the small defiant slant to his eyes, the way he’s standing right there, in front of him and Aletheia, where they couldn’t be missed even if he tried. The way that him and Zima are standing together like something he’s seen before, something familiar - like him and Aletheia in the days after they woke up, pretending  _we're okay, we're alright_ when they were both trying so hard but splintering apart no matter what they did - 

And Steve realizes, putting the pieces together one by one: Bucky did this. Bucky did this for him. Bucky went to her and made amends despite clearly not wanting to because he knew that Steve did. Again and again, over and over, for him.

One of the last pieces slots back into place.

Steve rushes forward, momentarily in another time, and takes hold of Bucky's hand.

The Bucky of today only stands terribly, completely still under his hands, every muscle tense,  and Steve comes back to himself with a jolt, realizes what he’s doing, remembers that he hasn’t touched Bucky properly since the the day he pulled off his mask and regained the slightest inkling of who he used to be to him.

He pulls his hands away like he’s been burnt, but he can’t stop the desperate mix of anxiousness and joy gnawing at him

“Bucky,” he says, trying to keep his voice even. “Don't force yourself, please. It's okay if you don't want to, I swear."

No response.

“Can you look at me?”

Bucky, if possible, tenses even further. When Steve had come up to him, he had dropped his eyes to the ground again, but now he raises his gaze, meets Steve's head on.

Steve sucks in a breath. He - he almost can't keep looking at him, the wave of memories, the rush of feeling of familiarity is so strong, and Bucky's eyes aren't dead at all anymore, not even a little; he is looking at Steve and telling him, in the way they used to talk without words as if they were two parts of a soul and Steve understands that all this time when he had been watching from a distance, not knowing how to help,  Bucky had slowly been coming back to life, clawing his way upwards from the depths of the hell of that mountain, climbing towards the sky.

This is him. This is his choice.

Steve notices, like it's suddenly come into focus, that the metal encasing Bucky's arm has gone. 

The clock tower tolls, sounding out the call for the day to begin. Steve ignores it, focused on the loss of the shining metal, building up towards asking about it. Bucky doesn't. He tilts head towards the sound, turning to the path leading down the hill and Steve, knowing what he means, says, "No," and then swallows down the rest as Bucky keeps looking right at him, Zima taking off, winging her way to her old haunt, his expression almost exasperated.

"Alright," Steve says helplessly after a minute, knowing he's caught between them, not caring in the slightest. "Alright, I'm coming with you."

 

 

It unfolds inside him as they climb down towards the village, that knowledge, that remembrance. He loves Bucky. He loves Bucky, and his small, barely-there smiles, and his quiet, incredible strength. The way he tries so hard, the way he cares, the way he can tell Steve so much without saying a single word. He loves him in his entirety, in his silences and his nightmares. It should feel bigger than it does, figuring it out, but the fact of Steve loving him slots into place like it was always there, another part of the past that his body remembered. And it _had_ been there, waiting in the fog of his memories; it just took him some time to find it:

He had loved Bucky before too. But things had fallen together differently in that era, and his realization then had come a little too late. All they had was a goodbye.

It is another gift, this second chance. Steve doesn't intend to waste it. 

They’ve lost too much time already.

But he needs to meet someone first.

 

 

Steve doesn’t really know if you have to take an appointment to meet with the elder or not. Either which way, he has a feeling that she will allow him to enter – it’ll be Wanda, if anyone, who might have a problem with his unannounced arrival.

He climbs up to the cave anyway. Now that he has had a taste of the sky, it’s excruciating, being tied down to the ground like this, having to slowly, laboriously climb all the way up the mountain while his lungs wheezed and his muscles seized up, when it would have been barely a two minute flight on Zima. He – isn’t used it, he realizes. He was perfectly healthy before and so it all seems doubly tiring.

But that doesn’t solve the mystery of why being in the air brings him alive.

It takes him close to an hour to reach the cave, and when he does he sees that he needn’t have worried about Wanda; she’s waiting for him, perched on a rock outside, her daemon nowhere in sight.

“Hey,” he says, unsure.

“Hello,” she replies serenely. “You should probably go inside.”

Aletheia gives a low whine. She’s scared. They both are. But he’s going to do this. All three of them deserve it, deserve some form of closure, closing of old wounds. He nods at Wanda and heads inside, and there she is, decades older than he last saw her, all those years having left their mark on her while he’s here, untouched by their passing.

And she looks at him, and her looks at her, and that’s all it takes, that one moment of connection for both of them to realize that – for now at  least – they remember each other, they know who they are, who they were, and all the years forgotten or passed disappear in an instant, it’s like they never happened at all. Steve smiles helplessly, a sharp ache high in his throat and moves forward to sit beside her, Aletheia gently padding over to where Michael rests in the shadows, curling up beside him. It’s a long time before either of them can bring themselves to speak, but Peggy brings her withered hand up to his cheek and behind the years that have changed her, Steve sees the echo of the proud, fierce girl she used to be, the amazing woman that she grew into that he never knew.

Once he’s able to gather the courage to speak, the words pour out of him, and from her too, he hears the story of the life he missed, the battles she waged and won and lost, and it hits him again, the strangeness of it all. She is now so much older and wiser than him, but he’s lucky to have even her.

Apart from Bucky, there’s no one else from his old life left. A new world has been built on top of the old one.

 

 

“I did love you, you know,” he says, afterwards, “It didn’t mean any less.”

She looks at him, the expression in her eyes soft for once. “I know, Steve. I loved you, and I loved Angie, and I loved Daniel, and I loved Gabe. And none of them were any less for the others.”

He takes her hand into his, the skin papery thin, worn by all the years he missed, going over what she said.

And - and they were so young. He still is, Steve realises with a jolt. He’s barely twenty. He’s got the rest of his life stretching out on front of him. He could do whatever he wants with it.

 

  
He leaves Peggy as the shadows grow longer, dropping a light kiss on her weathered cheek before he exits the cave. He nods at Wanda who gives him one of her eerie half-smiles, and heads back to the village.

Bucky is waiting for him. He gives him one of his soft, sunset smiles, quieter and wiser than he ever was before, and Steve heart wrenches in his chest, tugs at his ribcage. He feels like he’s seeing shadows of all the versions of Bucky he’s loved - could have loved - was best friends with - overlayed on top of one another layer on layer, adding depth and history and colour to create the incredible living, breathing person right in front of him. He feels like he’s seeing Bucky for the first time.

Steve wants to shout it from the rooftops. He never wants this feeling to fade, not when they’re a hundred years old for real, and are burning bright even as embers, carrying on the torch for the next generation, holding on to one another through time.

Who knows. But he hopes - he hopes that whoever he is in twenty years – thirty years – seventy years still looks at the person Bucky will be in all those uncertain futures and feels the same as he does today.  

 

 

  
He’s going to tell Bucky. He is.

It’s just – hard. He remembers what Bucky felt what was a few years ago for him, but it’s been decades for Bucky himself. Maybe he grew tired of waiting.

Maybe he forgot what he was waiting for.

But it would be unfair to him to draw this out further, to let Steve continue helping him without knowing everything behind it. Not that he wouldn’t have helped Bucky, or anyone else otherwise. He would have. But he wouldn't have had this depth of history, of years behind them to guide his way.

So: he will tell him. And he will do it today.

Probably.

If he can work up the nerve.

The next day, after work, he goes searching for Bucky. He isn't in any of his usual haunts - the beach of the field or the hearth in the hall. But Steve doesn't feel afraid. Soul-deep, he knows that Bucky's safe, and follows the feeling to a house on the edge of the village, out of sight of most of the current dwellings, decrepit and abandoned. As he approaches, another memory slots back into place, and he remembers that this used to be Bucky's house before. He used to come here every day. This was the house with the birthday party and the cake.

Bucky is sitting on the porch, watching Zima circle lazily above them, his eyes narrowed slightly, attention turning to Steve when he sees him.

"Hi, Buck." Steve says when he gets close enough. He feels foolish, but then he knew from the start that this wasn't going to be an easy conversation. "I - There's something I want to tell you."

Bucky looks at him, expectant.

I love you. Three words. As simple as that. 

It shouldn't be so hard to say. He fought in a war - _two wars_ \- for gods' sakes. But right now, it feels like the hardest thing he's ever done and he marvels at Bucky's courage all those years ago, putting himself out there, knowing he might get rejected. He opens his mouth to try again, but Bucky raises an unimpressed eyebrow and he's left flustered, the words deserting him once more.

"You're being a damned fool," Aletheia hisses at him.

"Well, what do you think I should do?" he mutters out of the corner of his mouth. She's not helping.

She huffs slightly. "Watch me."

Aletheia comes out from behind him, going up to Bucky, padding up to him with her loping wolf's grace and she - 

   - _lays her head on his leg._

Bucky’s eyes dart up and focus right on him, looking as astonished as Steve feels. And it feels so strange, Steve thinks weakly, heart beating unevenly in his chest, watching as Aletheia curls up at Bucky’s feet. It’s like a live wire running right through him, like a continuous strike of lightinng; he’s dizzy with it.

“I love you,” he says. It just slips out of him, like his soul is bared to Bucky, his very existence in his hands, and it is, it is.

It always will be.

Bucky just stares at him for a moment, and Steve feels his heart sinking as he doesn't respond, nevermind that he knew that this was a possibility that he was prepared for it, but it doesn't feel that way right now, not when he's opened himself up to him completely, it feels like the world is ending all over again. He turns away, wanting to escape the stifling presence of the house with the rush of memories it brings, to get some distance from Bucky to collect himself, but is stopped by the sound of his name.

“Steve.”

Bucky’s voice is like gravel, like the low rumbling of the sea against rocks in the distance. Steve’s breath catches in his throat.

It’s been so long.

Slowly, he turns around. It’s hard to look right at Bucky, overwhelmed as he is. But Steve tries. He tries with everything left in him There’s a small smile on his face, barely visible, but one that Steve vows to himself that he’ll do anything to see again, and it hits him again, everything he's feeling, everything he's ever felt magnified a thousand times, the sound of his voice, that soft, sunset smile

It’s too much.

He runs.

 

***

Steve opens his eyes, and wakes, and wakes.

He is curled up on the cliff, the grass rippling behind him

Buky is sitting at the edge of the cliff, his legs dangling over the platform a few feet below. Steve hovers, uncertain, but then he sees Bucky tilt his head slightly, turn his head just enough to let Steve know that he knows that Steve’s there.

Again, the tightness in his throat.

Steve walks forward and sits beside him, heart hammering in its familiar unsteady beat. He’s used to it now, he thinks. He can live with it.

Bucky is leaning forward slightly, his hair swinging forward to shield his face from Steve’s eyes. But he shifts slightly, without raising his gaze, and then they’re right next to each other – their legs pressing together.

Steve holds his breath for an infinite moment. Bucky is still and calm beside him. It doesn’t matter, he thinks wildly, it doesn’t matter if he’s changed his mind, but he knows that if that is the truth, it will be a wound whose scar will take a long time to fade. But that’s okay too, Steve realizes. He knows he can survive this. He’s gone through worse, and come out still breathing, still fighting.

And Steve realises something else too: You don’t let go of the people you’ve been. You carry them. And he is a warrior, a dragon-rider, a painter, a person frightened of himself, the boy who betrayed his own soul for a chance at peace, the boy who loved his best friend. The lightning rod across time. He is all of them. And he can choose who he wants to be next.

But for right now, this is enough: the sun-streaked sky fading to orange and pink as the day ends. Bucky, beside him, their legs pressing into one another, the sea stretching out in front of them to the horizon. Aletheia and Zima are further from the edge, curled up into one another in a mess of black and grey.

Bucky takes Steve’s hand, turning towards him, one hand rising to tuck that dark curtain of hair behind an ear.

Steve’s heart catches in his throat.

He raises his gaze to Bucky’s face, and Bucky is smiling at him, a slight quirk to his mouth. And it's there – it’s right there, in his eyes. His answer.

Steve smiles back. He can’t help it. It’s a blinding, overwhelming thing, to know, to have confirmation, even as silent and unsaid as it is. He looks at Bucky, the slight dark circles under his eyes, the faint shadow of stubble coming in, the softness of the curve of his mouth and holds on, intertwines his fingers. He thinks of the years they lost between them and the simple miracle of this moment, the two of them leaning into one another at the end of a long day.

Bucky is so close now. Steve can see the grey-blue pattern of his irises, feel the roughness of his palm as it comes back to cup his neck, his movements gentle and measured. Steve closes his eyes as Bucky moves in, closer and closer, each second moving towards the one when their lips will touch.

In the moment before the world starts anew, Steve thinks of falling; of flying, of bursting through the clouds and into the sun.


	5. blood and ice

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is more of an epilogue than anything else. Warnings for implied character death, though by now we know it's not permanent.  
> Art in this chapter is by [Inkforwords](http://inkforwordsart.tumblr.com/).

Steve is falling, and Bucky is falling below him, and he has to reach him, has to bridge that ever-growing gap now, before he meets the ground hurtling up towards them.

Almost there.

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees a rippling movement in the clouds, a hint of something impossibly enormous.

There’s a flash of red.

And then the false-king dragon bursts through the clouds and Steve and Zvezda swerve to avoid it, barely sparing the massive creature a passing glance, their focus intent on Bucky, tumbling through the air below, mouth open in a soundless scream. Zvezda has tucked her wings in, and Steve is leaning into her neck, heart pounding as they hurtle downwards faster than the eye can see, reaching out to grasp him. And -

There. Zvezda has Bucky in her claws. She flares her wings at the last second and Steve rides the movement, confident in her ability, attention back towards the hulking shadow above them, waiting to swallow them up. They set Bucky back down, Zvezda flipping him the right way up just before she opens her claws and he drops seamless, rolling and shifting to a run. There's barely time to exchange a glance with him - Steve and Zvezda take back to the skies, barely dodging the hurricane of fire that roars past them from the mouth of the beast.

They’re not winning. They haven’t even managed to hurt it yet. Until now, they’ve lost Bucky’s dragon, and Monty got so badly singed he had to be carried back home by his. Peggy is still up in the air, though, as marvelous as always.

But it won’t be enough. Steve can tell. And, judging by the warning look she sends him as he wings his way up, she can too. And then it comes to him. The answer. He pulls up beside her, both of them diving down in smooth synchronicity to send a blast of fire into the creature’s mouth just as it opens, both their shots hitting dead center.

“I know how we can beat it!” Steve yells as they work their way upwards for the next run. He tells her.

“No,” she says, immediately. “There has to be another way.”

“We don’t have time."

She knows.

She darts in, hovering close enough to press her forehead to his for an endless second, and then they’re diving down, down, again, for the beginning of the end. Peggy breaks her dive once they’ve targeted the red dragon, but Steve swoops to the ground, where Bucky is doing his best to reset the traps they had put up for the beast, his face still red and blotchy from his tears after losing his dragon, after almost dying.

Zvezda lands, and Steve gets down. They don’t have time for it, but Steve knows, somehow, that this is the end. He's okay with it. The seconds are ticking away, each moment with the beat of a dragon’s wings. Bucky runs up to him, running a hand across his face to clear the grime.

“Steve, what -”

They don’t have time. Steve wishes he could have said so many things, given Bucky the slightest bit back of all that he had given him. But: the seconds are ticking away.

Steve doesn’t say that he loves him. That would be unbearably cruel, not to mention unfair to both Bucky and Peggy. But he can do this, at least. He holds Bucky’s gaze for a moment, and then steps forward pressing his forehead to his the same way Peggy did a moment before. He isn't afraid of her seeing them: she knows, has always known about how Bucky felt about him. But now, in this last moment, he'll give him this, not leave him without letting him know, letting him understand that had the cards fallen differently he could have loved for him his whole life. He closes his eyes, and feels Bucky's hand come up to the back of his head as they hold on to one another. 

The moment ends. Steve opens his eyes, turning away before Bucky can open his and look at him understand what he's about to do, like he always does. Zvezda is waiting for him. In one smooth movement, he hauls himself onto her back. Bucky is still standing there, but a look of terrible realization is dawning on his face and Steve can't wait, can't watch, can't let him stop them.

He takes to the skies.

 

 ***

 

The great red dragon is dead.

The enemy is defeated.

Bucky doesn’t give a shit about all that any more. Peggy and the Commandos are fighting the remnants of the rear guard above him as he runs through the wreckage, through the ruins of the body, searching for a sign of Steve, a flash of blond hair.

_Please be alive. Please be alive._

His daemon is a mouse, curled up in his breast pocket, trembling with fear. He wants to curl up into a ball too - but first. Steve.

It takes too long to find him; he’s coughing in the smoke and there are black spots in his vision by the time he does, and for a horrible, sickening moment, he sees Steve’s suddenly small figure curled up on the ground beside Zvezda, her wings half covering him, the both of them completely motionless. He hauls Zvezda’s wings off him, his daemon climbing out of his pocket and shifting with some effort to a terrier to make sure that she’s okay as he pulls Steve into his arms almost unconsciously, heart in his throat, hoping, praying that he’s still alive.

His daemon tells him that Zvezda will be okay. One of her wings is twisted at an odd angle and she took the worst of the heat to protect Steve, but her heart beats steadily in her chest. She’ll recover.

Steve is another matter entirely  
  
It’s bad. When Bucky runs his hands over him, they come back bloody, and for a terrible second he can’t find his pulse. And then he finds a thready beat, and its like the the world has started again. He sucks in a breath. It's a small relief. He knows, seeing Steve, that he's going to die. There's nothing that the healers back on Skjoldr can do for him anymore. But Steve dying is - not something that can let happen. If he could offer the gods his own beating heart to keep him alive, he would.

His daemon looks at him, and says only one word: ice.

He understands.

Magic. The alpha dragon in the dragon nest at the heart of the wasteland. 

But his own dragon is dead. The others are still battling the remnants of the enemy force. There's no way he can get Steve there in time. And then Bucky looks at his own daemon, her terrier form, the fact that she hasn't settled yet, and knows what he must do.

“Please,” he begs her. “Please.” And he feels it when she gives in, when she agrees to what he's asking. She loves Steve as much as he does. She is him, after all.

And the world - tilts. Things that he knew, could viscerally feel, would settle one way, are wrenched sideways and forced together as she shudders and shifts, growing larger and larger until she was a dragon herself, and the strain on both of them was so much that Bucky nearly collapses on the spot, but he can’t let himself, pulls himself back up from the encroaching darkness inch by inch; he has to save Steve.

His daemon unfurls her wings.

He heaves Steve’s limp body onto her, the shock of contact much lessened by the fact that Steve’s not conscious, but still it’s like a continuous live wire directly to his heart.

Bucky pushes the feeling down. There’s no time for it here. He climbs onto his daemon’s back and closes his eyes, letting his mind shift to overlay hers. Daemons are not meant to be common cart animals; it is hugely draining on their humans, and people who have tried often end up losing consciousness from the strain. But he has no choice here. He wills his body to relax, and when they’re both ready, she lifts her wings into the air, bringing them down, launches them into the sky.

It’s horrible, nothing like riding his own dragon, effortless and easy. The effort is like holding back an avalanche with his bare hands, and he senses that if his concentration slipped for even a second, they would go tumbling down to the ground. But he doesn’t have a choice. Steve can’t die.

 

 

They fly for what feels like years, but it can only be minutes, the sound of the battle fading behind them.

A single pair of dark wings following them, but Bucky is too tired to notice.

On the way, they ghost past Skjoldr, and Bucky sees the white speck of Aletheia lying below them in the grass. They have no time, and it won't matter to Steve either which way now, but he thinks that Steve and his daemon deserve to be together. They swoop down, and he hauls her limp form onto his daemon's back, head swimming with how tired he is, how tired they both are.

But they can't give up now. They keep going.

He spares a glance to Steve. It's looking worse by the second. Aletheia is curled up between Steve and his daemon, barely clinging to consciousness. Steve, behind her, hasn’t stopped bleeding. His eyes have rolled back, leaving only the white visible.

It takes an eternity to reach the peaceful dragons’ nest, the explosion of ice in the midst of the wasteland surrounding on all sides. His daemon uses her dragon senses to call out a warning to the alpha inside, and they hurtle in through one of the entrances the friendly dragons showed them, landing on a rocky outcropping at the heart of the nest in front of a great pool of water feeding into the sea.

There’s a shifting movement under the water, and a flash of white, growing and growing until the alpha dragon emerges in response to their desperate call, towering over him and his tiny-in-comparison daemon, the temperature visibly dropping several degrees in its presence.

He kneels down, desperate. Please, is his only coherent thought, but he thinks the alpha dragon understands.

And then: a voice so loud it drowns out all other thought.

_I can do as you ask, youngling. But it has a price_

Whatever it takes, Bucky thinks. He remembers the paleness of Steve’s skin when he first found him, the moment he thought he was dead. Anything. Anything at all.

_So be it. But as he is healed by a creature of the air, the earth relinquishes its hold on him_.

Bucky nods, barely taking it in. He brings Steve in front of the alpha, laying him down, arranging his bloodless limbs. It’s too late, he thinks for an awful second before he catches the weak flutter of his pulse.

Then he steps back, drawn by something beyond himself as the alpha dragon brings his massive forefeet onto the outcropping, bending over Steve’s body, breathing out, and out and out, a steady stream of ice-cold breath, and he can feel the power in it, the magic that is flowing into Steve and knitting his muscles and bones back together, replacing the blood that he’s lost.  

His daemon is still a dragon, looking over the process as intently as he is, when he feels her stiffen, and both of them whip around in tandem, drawn by the sound of the flapping of wings, the distant, regimental footfalls of the enemy’s soldiers.

They followed him here.

His heart drops to his stomach. Steve is still being healed, and he knows, the alpha dragon is telling him – it will take more time, more time than either of them have. The nest is empty, all the other dragons having left to fight.

The alpha is still breathing out, out, out, but more slowly now, the fog of mist from its mouth forming a faint cocoon around Steve, but its massive eyes move up to meet his.

_You must defend the nest._

Yes, he thinks, but his heart in pounding in fear as he hears the measured thudding of what must be at least fifty echoing down the tunnel. He will. But the others –

_Are still engaged in their own battles._

Okay. Okay then.

Bucky looks down, to where Steve is loosely curled up around Aletheia, both of their breathing frighteningly slow, and realizes that there is only one thing that he will do, that he _can_ do. His path was written for him the moment he met Steve.

He and his daemon advance to the mouth of the tunnel leading out. The footfalls are getting louder. Out of the gloom, he sees the first row of soldiers approaching, three abreast. He sinks into a defensive stance, blade at the ready.

The first soldier catches sight of both of them. Bucky raises his sword, holding onto it with both hands, and rushes forward into the tunnel. Better to take them in the confined space where they won’t be able to surround him rather than the open terrain icy cavern, not to mention that’s where the alpha dragon is working on Steve. His daemon follows after him and the battle truly begins.

He slices through the first few, trying not to wound fatally, but then he sees the first one getting up again and he realizes that if he’s to have any chance of surviving this its kill or be killed. His daemon roars behind him and engages with the soldier’s daemons, picking them up in her huge maw and clamping down. He swallows down the nausea and faces the next few. He has a slight advantage. His armor is light and he’s young and fast, easily slipping in and out between them. But their heavy armor protects them from most blows and they have the advantage of numbers.

He can’t keep this up forever. He just fought another battle, lost a great friend, and then carried himself here through sheer force of will. He’s tired.

One manages to slip past him, and _nononono Steve_ -

He gives a wordless cry that his daemon echoes – he can’t afford to turn around otherwise the ones in front of him will gut him, but Steve is an easy target right now – and somewhere deep in his mind, in his dragon-shaped daemon mind, he hears the alpha dragon respond to their call for help.

The alpha dragon roars, a great, deafening, world-shaking sound, and ice erupts from the ground between the advancing soldier and Steve, growing by the second, blocking off the rest of them, protecting the heart of the nest. And Bucky drags out the last of his strength, gives a choked out gasp as he heaves the body of the soldier he just killed – _killed_ , oh gods – off himself and raises his sword again, faces the next soldier, and the next, cutting a bloody swath through them, his daemon tearing their daemons to Dust at his side, but their reserves are flagging, and the soldiers are fresh, well trained. One of them gets a hit to his stomach in and he doubles over, gasping, and then they’re on him, and one kicks him in the head and the world goes grey, a ringing sound in his ears. His daemon roars in anger and staggers to stand in front of him.

Defend the nest. Protect Steve.

He climbs to his feet, limbs trembling with exhaustion, and so he’s able to see it when it happens. There’s a line of soldiers approaching his daemon, and he almost instinctively disregards them, because obviously nobody would do that, nobody would even think of touching her, they’re probably just trying to find a new angle on him – but then they rush at her, grabbing at her with their bare hands.

The shock hits him first. He cries out, a choked off gasp, echoing her weak, startled roar. He can feel them, their hands burning on her, on him, and it’s wrong, it shouldn’t be happening, it’s like the world has been turned inside out, like his innards have been carved out of him and are being displayed for the world to see right in front of his eyes. He doubles over, retching, bile coming up that he barely manages to swallow down, swaying on his feet. They’re touching her, oh gods, let her go, pleaseplease let her go, but they only bring out ropes and start binding her, and he’s too weak, too shocked, too defenseless to see the soldier coming right at him.

The staff hits him in the head, and he falls to his hands and knees, still retching. They’re _touching_ her, oh gods – they’re _touching his daemon_. Another hit to his head, and he knows he’s done for, falls to the ground, doesn’t care. He screams as one of them put his hands on her, tightens the rope, the noise suddenly cut off as he’s kicked in the stomach, all the breath forced out of him at once as the force of the blow rolls him onto his side.

This is where he’s going to die, he realizes hazily as they kick him again, as they start dragging his daemon further and further away. He needs to get up, make sure that Steve will be safe, but his consciousness has receded to a single point, his body and its aches and pains suddenly far away, the only thing that he’s aware of are anymore are the sight of her being drawn away from him and a growing, gnawing pain deep in his chest that he’s never felt before. The faceless soldier above him raises his staff again to bring it down for the last time.

And through the blood dripping down his forehead into his eyes, through the growing screaming, soul-deep pain of his soul being torn apart, past the sight of the staff coming down and his daemon’s weakening struggle, Bucky sees the wall of ice still going up, up, higher and thicker than any of the soldiers have a chance of breaching now, sealing Steve away, a flash of blond refracted through the whiteness.

Steve will be safe, he thinks. Steve will live.

It’s enough for him.

_~Fin~_

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Fanart for Where No One Goes](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11858268) by [cloud_wolfbane](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cloud_wolfbane/pseuds/cloud_wolfbane)




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